September 2016 - Spinning Code

Bad data systems do not justify sexist your behavior

This week we get a letter from Atlantic Broadband, our ISP, addressed to “Aaron & Eliza Crosman Geor”. My wife has never gone by Eliza and her last name is not “Geor”.

It’s been this way since we signed up with them, when we ask them to fix it they acknowledge that they cannot because their database cannot correctly handle couples with different last names who both want to appear on the account. Apparently it is the position of Atlantic Broadband that in 2016 it is reasonable to tell a woman she cannot be addressed by her legal name because it would be expensive for them to fix their database, and therefore she must be misaddressed or left out entirely.

I consider this unacceptable from old companies, but Atlantic BB was founded in 2004 – there are probably articles about not making assumptions about people’s names that are older than their company.

Folks, it is 2016, when companies insult people and then blame their databases it is because they do not consider all their customers worthy of equal respect.

So let’s get a few basics out of the way:

Software reflects the biases of the people who write it and buy it.
If your database tells someone their name is invalid your database is not neutral. Just because you don’t get the push-back that Facebook sees when they mess this up does not mean what you’re doing is okay.
If your database assumes my household follows 1950s social norms, the company that uses it considers 1950s social norms acceptable in 2016 – and there are probably a few of those they don’t want to defend (I hope).
When an email, phone rep, or letter calls me by my wife’s last name or her by mine, in both cases they are assuming she has my last name not that I have hers. This is a sexist assumption that the company has chosen to allow.

Of course Atlantic isn’t the only company that does this: Verizon calls me Elizabeth in email a couple times a week because she must be primary on that account (one person must lead the family plan), and Nationwide Insurance had to hack their data fields for years so my wife could appear on our car insurance card (as required by law) every time we moved because their web interface no longer allowed the needed changes. The same bad design assumptions can be insulting for other reasons such as ethnic discrimination. My grandmother was mis-addressed by just about everyone until she died because in the 1960s the Social Security Administration could not handle having an ‘ in her name, and no one was willing to fix it in the 50 years that followed SSA’s uninvited edit to her (and many other people’s) name.

In all these cases representatives all say something to the effect of “our computers cannot handle it.” And that of course is simply not true. Your systems may not be setup to handle real people, but that’s because you don’t believe they should be.

Let’s check Atlantic Broadband’s beliefs about their customers based on how they address us (I’m sure there are some additional assumptions not reflected here but these are the ones they managed to encode in one line in this letter):

They assume they are addressing one primary account holder: I happen to know from my interactions with them that they list my first name as: “Aaron & Eliza”, and my last name as “Crosman Geor”. Plenty of households have more than one, or even two, adults who expect equal treatment in their home. Our bank and mortgage company know we are both responsible adults why is this so hard for an ISP (or insurance company, or cell provider, credit card, etc)?
They assume my first name isn’t very long: They allowed 13 characters, but 4 more is too many. I went to high school with a kid who broke their database by exceeding the 26 character limit it had (they didn’t ask the kid to change his name, the school database admin fixed the database), but Atlantic can barely handle half that.
They assume my last name isn’t very long: Only 12 characters were used and they stopped in a strange place. I know many people with last name longer than that: frequently people who have hyphenated last names blow past 12. Also the kid with a 26 character first name – his surname was longer.
They assume my middle name isn’t an important part of my name: If they had a middle name field, they could squeeze a few more letters in and make this read more sensibly. But they only consider first and last names important. Plenty of people have three names – or more – they like to have included on letters.
They assume it is okay to mis-address me and my wife: The name listed is just plain wrong, but they believe it’s okay to keep using this greeting. They assume this even after they have been told it’s not, and even after we’ve reduced service with them (if another ISP provided service to my house I’d probably cut it entirely although mostly for other reasons). They believe misaddressed advertisements will convince me I need a landline or cable package again.

Now I’ll be fair for just a minute and note something they got right: they allow & and spaces in a name so Little Bobby Tables might be able to be a customer without causing a crisis (partially because his name is too long for them to fit a valid SQL command into the field).

Frequently you’ll hear customers blame themselves because their names are too long or they have done something outside the “norm”. Let’s be clear: this is the fault of the people who write and buy the software. Software development is entirely too dominated by men, as is the leadership of large companies. When a company lacks diversity in key roles you see that reflected in the systems built to support the work. Atlantic’s leadership’s priorities and views are reflected in how their customers are addressed because they did not demand the developers correct their sexist assumptions.

These problems are too common for us to be able to refuse to do business when it comes up. I will say that when we switched our insurance to State Farm they did not have any trouble understanding that we had different last names and their systems accommodated that by default.

If you do business with a company that makes these (or other similar mistakes) I think it’s totally reasonable to remind them every time you reasonable can that it’s offensive. Explain that they company is denying you, your loved ones, and/or your friends a major marker of their identity. Remind them they are not neutral.

If you write data systems for a living: check the assumptions you’re building into your code. Don’t blame the technology because you used the wrong character set or trimmed the field too short: disk is cheap, UTF-8 has been standard for 15+ years, and processors are fast. If the database or report layout doesn’t work because someone’s name is too long the flaw is not the name.

We all make mistakes and bad assumptions sometimes, but that does not make it okay to deny people basic respect. When we make a bad assumption, that’s a bug, and good developers are obligated to fix it. Good companies are obligated to prevent it from happening in the first place.

Try doing it backwards

As part of my effort not to repeat mistakes I have tried to build a habit in my professional – and personal – life to look for ways to be better at what I do. I recently rediscovered how much you can learn when you try doing something you know well backwards: I drove on the left side of the road.

This is the Holden Barina we rented while in New Zealand. — This is the Holden Barina we rented while in New Zealand, a brand of car I’d never heard of before this trip. It was a good car for the mountain driving even if the wipers and lights controls were reversed from cars at home.

By driving on the left I discovered how many basic driving habits I have that are built around driving on the right. The clearest being that the whole time I was in New Zealand I never knew if anyone was behind me, and the whole time I couldn’t figure out why. The mirrors on the car worked just fine, but it turned out I wasn’t looking at them. Driving home from the airport after we returned to the US I realized that every few seconds my eyes jump to the upper right of my vision to check the mirror. In New Zealand I spent the whole time glancing at the post between the windshield and the driver’s side window (which had seemed massive to me while I was there) instead of the mirror. It made me conscious of my driving habits in a way I haven’t been in years, and as a consequence, I think it’s made me a better driver. I’m thinking about little details again; I’ve been more aware of where I am on the road and what I’m doing to keep track of the other cars around me.

My wife drove this section so I got to take some pictures. Amazing scenery but she had to adjust quickly. — My wife drove this section while I got to take some pictures. She got to learn to drive on the left on winding mountain roads – we don’t recommend that approach.

A few years ago I was watching videos from the MIT Algorithms course to refresh some of my basics, and because I wanted to know what had been added in the decade since I’d taken that class at Hamilton. During the review of QuickSort the professor mentioned that it wasn’t originally a divide-and-conqueror process, but a loop based approach meant to work on a fixed length array (so you could use a fixed block of memory). And as I recall he suggests that the students should work out the loop based version. So riding on the train home from work I pieced it together, and found that it’s an elegant process. It’s not something I ever expect to have cause to implement, but it did help me improve my thinking about when to use recursive functions vs when to use a loop, and helped me think about when to use recursion, loops, and other tools for processing everything in a list. There was a session by John Kary at DrupalCon this year on rethinking loops that pushed me again to revise some of how I made those decisions. Again his talk took the reverse view of much of my previous thinking and was therefore very much worth my time.

If you’re feeling like you are in a good groove on something, try doing it backwards and see what you discover.

My Grandmother’s Hats

Near the end of her life my grandmother made hats – lots of hats. Most of them made from cheap acrylic yarns and most sized for children. She lived alone and spent much of her time sitting in her apartment watching C-SPAN and knitting. At the time her apartment was a few blocks from my office so I went to visit her about once a week and we’d chat about current events, politics, and whatever else was on her mind. If you went to visit her during the winter and you were not wearing a hat when you arrived (and since she was on the 19th floor I usually took my hat off in the elevator) you were strongly encouraged to take a few to keep warm when you left.

Blue and white handmade hat. — This is one of the hats I still have, made from yarn my mother had used several years earlier for her own project.

My mother and aunt would bring her yarn from various sales and the ends of projects, and I would occasionally take a bag or two or hats with me after a visit. I tried giving them away on the street to homeless people who often slept near her apartment or my office but they weren’t usually interested. I sent a couple bags to Afghans for Afghans (before I realized they needed items made from better fiber). We sent some to a friend who taught in Buffalo (Nanny loved the picture of children wearing her hats sent in the thank you note).

Even having given away a couple bags full, when it came time for her to stop living alone we discovered there was a closet full of grocery bags stuffed with hats. We laughed at the large number of hats she had stashed away but as her last charitable act – even though it was one she never knew about – we gave them away. My wife and I gave them to school teachers who had children in need. My sister took a few hundred to a women’s shelter. And we donated them to other useful causes when we could find people about to use them. Slowly my grandmother’s work was spread across several communities.

Fibre on the shelf — Fibre in our house that isn’t used promptly may become a decoration.

In addition to working in technology, I also spin – as in make yarn from wool and other fibers. I get more or less done depending on the ebbs and flows of life, but I generally have some fiber in the process of becoming yarn on a spinning wheel. My fibre stash is small compared to some spinners’ but since lots of my fiber is either a gift or a random purchase from events like the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival instead of a specific project, I usually have extra yarn around too.

My Ashford traditional, a gift from my mother-in-law. This is my primary spinning wheel, although I have a few others.

Wool yarn I made recently. — Wool yarn I made recently from fibre my mother-in-law gave me a couple years ago .

I also knit. And yes, I knit hats. Visiting in her apartment talking about the hats she was making Nanny shared – more than once – the pattern she used to make all those hats. She’d memorized it from some magazine or another years earlier (or at least a pattern like it) and so I typically make them about them same as she did:

Pick a size needle that works with the yarn you have, and will result in the size you want (this takes trial and error if you aren’t an experienced knitter who knows their gage).
Cast on 96 stitches (she sometimes said 76, but usually it was 96 and that appeals to my techie nature).
Work 2 inches in Knit 2, Purl 2.
Work 3 inches in Stockinette.
Knit 2 together, Knit 6, repeat to the end of the row. Purl back.
Knit 2 together, Knit 5 repeat to the end of the row. Purl back.
Continue this way until, decreasing the number of stitches between each gather until your gathers start to collide. Then knit 2 together every stitch (still purl back).
When you have 4 or 5 stitches on the needles, cut the yarn with about a foot of extra.
Pull the end back through the remaining loops, and stitch down the open side.

This is one of mine made from some yarn that was started during a workshop I did on spinning with a drop spindle for high school kids. — This is one of mine made from some wool left over from a workshop I did on spinning with a drop spindle and some singles I used to teach a friend’s kids a little about spinning. Once plied together the variation in the singles formed a surprisingly good yarn with interesting color mixes.

I’ve made hats for friends and family, although certainly not in the volume she produced them. Last winter I realized I could use some of my stash of fiber to start making them to give away like we did with hers. And so now I have a slowly growing collection of hats (some with matching scarves) in the hopes that I am able to do something half as useful with them as we managed with my grandmother’s.

Here's one of the matching scarves. These are sized for child, but I'll probably make more sizes over time. — Here’s one of the matching scarves. These are sized for child, but I’ll probably make more sizes over time.

My grandmother was a challenging person in many ways. But she always tried to be nice to strangers and people in need. So this has become my tribute to the parts of her that I loved most.