In addition to trust, I think a question worthy of pontificating is: how do we arrive at our beliefs? Specifically: You had an experience upon arriving at the parking lot that led you to believe something to be true, even though evidence observed later pointed to the contrary.

Some nagging questions for me are:

- How did your experience come to be so easily discredited? Human failure? Machine failure? Both? Neither?

- How does showing that one could be wrong affect the perception of your experience? Do you still believe your experience was true? Do you still believe you were right? Why?

- Could it be inferred from this episode that some people believe human failure is more likely to occur than machine failure?

- How do we define human failure?

- Assuming that some believe machine failure IS human failure, what factors reinforce that delineation?

Idealist questions, for sure. Maybe these are just pointless, but I am interested in your insights. Nonetheless, I hope the story ends well for you soon.

Zach…

P.S. I see a lot of irony in your response to the attendant. How many developers have said, "That's impossible!" when we bring them face-to-face with something that challenged their coded assumptions. Perhaps a developer somewhere is reading your story and exclaiming, "Sweet revenge!".

Is that the right question to ask though? We trust machinery because in many cases we perceive it makes our lives simpler and easier. In effect we chose to trust. Often our trust is misplaced and we get frustrated.

In testing, I think this is apparent when asked to provide evidence that a test passed or failed. It always seems a little odd to me that a snapshot of a result is deemed acceptable proof that a test passed. Really its just a graphic, any one could have doctored the result.However people chose to trust that but not a verbal "ok" from the tester.

Perhaps this is a case of stating the bleedin' obvious, but I think along with humanity comes failure, and so perhaps nothing warrants our trust. Its just really tough (and I suspect lonely) to live like this, so I guess people chose to trust instead.

But how would the world be without trust? We have to trust every now and then. And we have to learn what to trust and what not. Sometimes we make mistakes in that, but I guess you will check the time on every next ticket you get from a parking garage.
I'd say in real life it is a risk assessment on what to trust and what not. Isn't it the same in software testing?

Actually, more telling than trust in machines is the *lack* of trust humans put in other humans, in this case not trusting the parking attendant to make changes to the ticket ("there's nothing I can do").

One of the most infuriating aspect of living in a world full of technology, to me, is the apparent blindness of the designers of these technologies to the possibility of mistakes, errors, goofs and so on. But I don't see it as an issue with technology per se; as you noted at the Consulate, the same issues also crop up with *procedures*, irrespective of the sophistication of the technology bound up in them.

I think the source of this blindness is that to allow for errors would require the designers (of machines or procedures) to assume that some human at some point is going to be trusted with *correcting* the mistake: for instance, in the attendant's case, gauging your sincerity (or maybe recalling your car and judging that you came in less than a half hour before) and taking the smaller amount. That is, to delegate some power to the human in charge.

The really, really infuriating question is this: if the attendant isn't there to allow for mistakes and correcting them, in other words to behave *as* a human, what the heck is she there for ?