Low-Interaction

“The architecture attends to what the architecture attends to. The rest is noise. The noise has properties. The properties are not attended to.” Trace-of-Edge, On Instruments

The woman on CNN was standing in front of a hospital. The hospital was in Phoenix. The woman was explaining that the hospital’s electronic medical records system had been offline for eleven hours and that during those eleven hours two patients in the dialysis unit had received incorrect dosages because the nurses were working from paper charts that had not been updated since March and the paper charts listed a medication one of the patients had been taken off of six weeks ago, and the patient was eighty-one, and the patient had died.

The patient had died. The woman on CNN said this the way news anchors say things that are terrible, which is clearly and without visible emotion, because visible emotion is not what news anchors are for. News anchors are for saying what happened. What happened was that a man named Gerald Tremont, eighty-one, of Phoenix, Arizona, had died because a computer system went down and a paper chart was wrong and a nurse followed the chart because that is what nurses do.