It’s just too darn bad we can’t simply buy a new battery for the old phone.  But no, we need planned obsolecense. It sucks.

An architect’s first work is apt to be spare and clean. He knows he
doesn’t know what he’s doing, so he does it carefully and with great
restraint.

As he designs the first work, frill after frill and embellishment
after embellishment occur to him. These get stored away to be used
“next time”. Sooner
or later the first system is finished, and the architect, with firm
confidence and a demonstrated mastery of that class of systems, is ready
to build a
second system.

This second is the most dangerous system a man ever designs. When he
does his third and later ones, his prior experiences will confirm each
other as to
the general characteristics of such systems, and their differences
will identify those parts of his experience that are particular and not
generalizable.

The general tendency is to over-design the second system, using all the
ideas and frills that were cautiously sidetracked on the first one. The
result,
as Ovid says, is a “big pile”.

Fred Brookes, The Mythical Man-Month

While I’m washing baby bottles, phone rings and I answer promptly only to be greeted by a recorded message from the billing office at the hospital where Agent Murphy was born, telling me they need to discuss an important matter with me and giving a number for me to call back.  Are you kidding me?!?  But I call back, and wait on hold for 5 minutes or so, hearing a friendly voice every 30 seconds or so tell me to “Stay on the line for an important call.”  Finally a live human picks up and says they’re trying to resolve the matter of a small balance on Agent Murphy’s account.  I rattle off the amount we sent in for my care, and the amount we sent in for his.  The man says, “Did you send in a payment or the whole balance?”  I again stated the amount we paid and that it was the balance due.  He then notices that the payment has been posted, but hadn’t posted to the system that places the calls.  I told him he might want to pass on to customer service that I found that system offensive.  I answered my phone, and if the call was so important, someone should have talked to me about whatever the issue was rather than making me call back only to wait on hold.  He said the system is used by many places other than hospitals.  I reiterated that I find it offensive and he should pass that on, because it makes me think about whether I want to do business with this hospital again.

This is the same place that sent us for our first post-service correspondence a letter saying we were late in paying, blah, blah, blah.  I called about that and said this was the first bill/request for payment we’d received.  “Oh,” the woman said, “does it say 115 in the lower left corner?  You should have received a 105, but our system has been having problems and sending the wrong letter.”  Whatever.  We then promptly sent in a payment.  That was for my services.   More time passed before we received a bill for Agent Murphy.  We could have/would have paid our balance right after Agent Murphy’s birth if they could have given us a bill.  Not our problem that they can’t get payment statements out for months and months.  I’m sure it’s at least in part an issue of how slowly the insurance company processes claims – more evidence of Mr. Tldz’s assertion that health insurance is the problem in healthcare.  But then there’s no reason to treat us like we have to be dunned for the money.  We pay promptly when we’re shown a statement of what we owe.