First of all, this thread is about two weeks old. But since I got dinged with an alert due to your two posts, I guess I can try to rehash one of my points that I was trying to make that I'd have thought would be uncontroversial. But from your two responses, it seems that either it ain't uncontroversial or perhaps that I didn't, or am not, making my point clear enough. Let me try again.
In one of my earlier posts, I had said this:
When new modern technology is incorporated into LE's/Call-center's procedures, new types of errors shouldn't be introduced. If and/or when those new types of errors are discovered, then they ought to be removed or at least marked so that the people involved -- such as LE and dispatchers and the call centers -- will be aware of those potential new, and unexpected, types of errors.
Now these new types of errors cannot be laid down either totally or partially at the feet of the homeowner. These types of errors are totally the responsibility of those parties involved with that new system -- they can divvy it up among themselves. These parties can include the software company that provided that new modern technology, those who were responsible for writing the specs for that technology, those who were responsible for testing that technology, etc.
I don't know who dropped the ball, but the ball was dropped somewhere among those parties. What I do know is that the homeowner had nothing to do with anything that was involved with these types of new errors that were introduced by that new technology.
Now, these new errors cannot be excused as:
"Well, **** happens" sort of situation.
as one of you put it in your posts.
There are some types of errors that can be put down to "s*** happens", such as when the address is mistyped or miswritten or misunderstood somewhere down the line. We've all run into them, where numbers are mixed up, where "street" instead of "boulevard" is used, etc. Those are the types of errors that are, er, "normal", when LE or anyone has to get somewhere.
These "normal" errors cause a permutation of the correct address. But the type of error that occurred in the incident under discussion does not fall into one of those types. That is, it is not a permutation of a correct address.
The error that occurred is uniquely due to the new technology combined with the new (buggy?) software. It is an artificial type of error. That is, it is not something that a reasonable person would be expected to accept as being an understandable error. This type of error is completely foreign, completely unnatural, and is an error due to inadequate specifications and/or design and/or testing.
Let me try using an analogy:
As bank customers, we try to do online banking, and often, we'd get some weird error message or weird behavior that doesn't make any sense to us, yet, to those software programmers who wrote the code it does. I sorta remember trying to do a little transfer or something within my bank account, and everything was going normal until the point where my account looked unexpectedly empty and I got a weird error message.
That was a shock to me. I went and scrambled around trying to reach customer service, for I was thinking that someone had hacked into my account and had emptied it while I was there online. Well, to make the story short, the problem was that the bank was doing one of its financially balancing of accounts or something during the middle of the night, and so, it wasn't displaying the values of my accounts.
Now the behavior of what was being displayed made sense to the software designers and to those in customer support because they knew what was happening from knowing the internals of the software or by having been told. But I didn't know, and their software behavior and their error messages didn't make sense to me as a typical customer. (Something better that they could've done: They could have easily frozen the online screens I was seeing and displayed a message saying that the bank was updating the accounts and for me to please wait a few minutes.)
I'm seeing this be somewhat parallel to the problem we're having:
You, meaning the LE and the dispatch center and others that are involve on that side of the fence, are like the banking people. You've been conditioned to accept the errors that are introduced by the new technology -- and many of you have stopped questioning the reasonableness of those weird new errors.
Me, like the older adult crowd, having lived normal lives, know that it is reasonable to run into errors that involve permutations of correct addresses. We expect that to happen now and then. Those types of errors are unfortunate, but they do happen. We put those errors down to
"Well, **** happens" sort of situation. But that uniquely new type of error -- getting a cell-tower address which somehow got introduced into the system as a residential address -- is not one of those
"Well, **** happens" type of error.
ASIDE: I've worked on many new technology systems, and I've debugged them at low levels and at high system levels. I've seen too many "features" pass through into newly released software. And I've seen this phenomenon of where the implementers/programmers think the system behavior and messages is fine but where the end-user is confused by that behavior and those messages.