Messin with Sasquatch

Hat tip to Jackie.

What did we expect? The not-very-shocking failures of healthcare.gov

So healthcare.gov's launch was a customer service disaster. As a merchant, I'm less surprised by it's failure than the fact that people are surprised it's a failure. The theater of mock astonishment that the media have acted out in the last month has reminded me of the scene in Casablanca when Captain Renault comes into Rick's gambling hall—where he had been gambling himself, the day before—to declare, "I'm shocked—shocked!—to find that gambling is going on in here." 

Think about your experience with healthcare and government websites. Have you ever dealt with any doctor through their website? How many times have you seen your health records as an electronic file? Ever looked up your itemized insurance bill online? How about the federal government—ever filled out your taxes at irs.gov? When is the last time you checked the balance in your account at socialsecurity.com? Arranged to ship a package at usps.com?

Doctors, insurance companies and most parts of the federal government live in a nearly a web-free world. They don't use the internet for much of anything, let alone working with customers. Why is it a surprise that when they had to build a consumer website it failed? Why is anyone shocked—shocked!—to find that healthcare.gov is a pile of crap?

Even if the contractors were brilliant, and I don't doubt many were, the deck was stacked against them. I've read what the site must do and it's very complex. Take the act of verifying that a person is who they say they are, a central part of determining their eligibility for aid. If you're like me, there have been plenty of times you've had trouble logging into a website that you've already logged into before. Now imagine that the website has to find out who you are before it can log you in for the first time. Then imagine the website contains 350 million people like you in the database. Then imagine the database doesn't really exist, it's a compilation of multiple databases. That's healthcare.gov.

Apple spoiled us. Before them software always broke. (It's worth reading this amazing piece, though, to see how broke the iPhone was just a week before Steve Jobs made his groundbreaking presentation.) All this isn't to say that healthcare.gov shouldn't work—it should. And because it was always going to have launch trouble they should have had a Plan B and Plan C ready to go. Backups to help the roll-out, like a longer period between launch and required sign-up, local sign-up offices for in-person guidance, and more advertising that customers can sign up on the phone. But all that aside, it's just good to remember that making software work correctly is hard. It's not shocking when it fails.

The Worst Run Industry In America is my look at the American health care industry, its service, prices and promises, from my view as a merchant.

Drank Journal No. 20: Recent reading

"Interviewer: What makes you happy when you pick up a restaurant wine list? Lynch: I can tell you what makes me unhappy is when it weighs 40 pounds. I just don’t get that. Make the selection for us"

An interview with Kermit Lynch, my favorite wine importer.

Wine and liquor go up, beer goes down: beer drinking among 20somethings has dropped 30% in the last two decades.

You're preaching to the choir: why canned beer is better than bottled.

Mapping the layout of Pouring Ribbons' bar.

Weird choice of words and images

Nothing says homegrown thanksgiving  like a bluetooth iPhone temperature probe.

Visual recipe for pour over coffee

Bluebottle coffee.

And ours, not quite so visual:

 

Recent Reading, Restaurant Edition

How dynamic is the New York City restaurant market? This article reports on 18 new and changing restaurants—on one street. The writer is not even making the case that this is strange. Because it's true. I joke—but it's not really a joke—that every time I come back from Ann Arbor there's a new restaurant in my neighborhood.

Why are restaurants so loud? One theory: because a quiet restaurant says, "I'm a failure."

Annoyed at the mannerisms of today's typical restaurant menus? This guy is too. Five failures and fixes for the modern menu.

My Velvet Undergrounds

I've run two websites in my life. The one I have now, Zingermans.com, and the one I ran in high school. 

Well, the first one wasn't really a website because, at the time, the internet as we know it didn't exist. Technically I was running a Bulletin Board Service, known to us nerds as a BBS. But it was essentially a website, in the most low-fi sense of the word. It was a homemade operation, hosted on a Commodore 64 with two 512K disc drives all of which amounted to a lake of memory more shallow than you'd find in a toaster today. My friend and I ran it out of his parents' basement. It was a dial-up only world then, which means we had to buy our own phone line. We went 50/50 on the monthly payment, my half came from an after-school job at Rent-a-Flick video. We hooked the one phone line into one modem, which meant one person could log into the website at a time. 

What could one person do on a website as slim as a newsletter? A lot, it turns out. We had comment boards for music, art, literature, poetry, and, of course, hacked games. It was the pre-porn internet, everything was strange and innocent and sometimes even artsy. Hundreds visited every week. It's the place where I discovered that the only way to learn how to write is to write—constantly. I had a paper or two due every month in school but on my website I wrote something public every day. There were no graphics running interference. A 300 baud modem is so slow that all it can manage is text. When you downloaded a post the feed arrived at such a pathetic pace you could pretty much read the words as they printed themselves across the green screen.

We called the website the Velvet Underground. I owned a cassette copy of 1967's Velvet Underground and Nico with the Warhol banana cover art. I didn't yet know how deeply Lou Reed's band was woven into what I loved, but I liked them a lot and, frankly, it was a great name so we stuck with it. The next year I chose my major, art history, in part based on my love for Warhol and his connection to this music. A few years later I moved abroad to teach English and chose to live in Czechoslovakia, the home of the Velvet Revolution, named in part because Vaclav Havel smuggled Velvet Underground records into communist Prague. I listened to the Velvet Underground during all of those times and have ever since. There are early life music crushes that I return to with embarrassment, just like I do most of my early writing. The Velvet Underground is never one of them.

In America's popular music memory, the late 1960s is remembered fondly, usually a hazy late afternoon bloom of West Coast psychedelia. In my opinion that musical genre will fade to a comic footnote of history. But in one hundred years people will still listen to the Velvet Underground and they will still sound relevant, they will never grow old.