Sententiae: Hi - I'm here to install your new software

The most terrifying words in the English language.

New hardware, new software, whatever: your life will be hell until all the bugs are worked out. Last year my doctor's office installed new software to make the office more efficient: two months of lost appointments, missed calls, misinformation and confusion. But now it is all working fine, we think.

Remember the FBI's attempt to upgrade their computers? Spent millions, then had to pull the plug on the whole program because it was so messed up it was unusable.

And here is another one. Prince George's County in Maryland installed a new SchoolMax program (owned by a Canadian company) to do the scheduling. You can guess the rest:

Almost as soon as they began testing the scheduling component of SchoolMax during the past school year, officials realized there were flaws in the new computer system, which was meant to speed the process of assigning each student to classes. They lost more than a month patching it, falling further behind as each deadline passed.

It was, of course, a disaster. Thousands of students with schedules that made no sense, or no schedules at all. Oh, yes. What computers screw up, bureaucrats can make worse. The school system didn't bother to warn anyone that there was a problem. So...

At a news conference Thursday, Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. said that "to have more than 8,000 high school students out of class on the first day is inexcusable."[It's now been over four days]
"I want to offer my sincere apologies to the students, families and staff of Prince George's County public schools for the severe disruption to the school year that these scheduling difficulties have imposed," he added.

One other common feature of such stories also crops up. The software company blames the school system, the school system blames the software company. Can something be done about all this? You betcha.