This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but with badly thought out systems and automation.

O2 cuts of my mobile phone when the bill isn't paid, fair enough, but they do this without notifying me, sometimes it will try and divert to customer service, this time it just says "Call Barred" (assuming you are looking at the screen - tricky when you have your ear to the ear piece, otherwise you just here some obscure tone that means nothing to anyone). Their customer service says "that is just how the system works", well someone obviously didn't think very hard about it before designing a system used by millions of people.

Today Google is able to show me a satellite image of where one of our local tyre companies are, but can't show me a map, despite the fact I know it has one of the area normally (See Google does hate me).

Of course we lived without mobile phones, and free maps on how to get to places, for many millions of years, although for most of them people never had to replace their cars spare tyre, and would think twice about crossing Devon in late Autumn just to go to a talk. I'm luckily of the generation that still has paper maps in their car.

We need to make the technology, and the systems, all more friendly, and reliable, Google are close, possibly the closest yet.

These are inconveniences, but recently Canada was having supply problems with several different types of thyroid medications, medications essential to the health of those that have to take them daily. Here the problems were legal, and contractual, one brand was sold to another company delaying the usual smooth flow, whilst this was happening a related medication was late in delivery to a central distribution depot.

In principal this shouldn't be a problem, equivalent medications are widely available in the continental United States, but many US states don't allow pharmacists to fulfil Canadian prescriptions. In the end some patients reverted to compounding pharmacies, where the pills are made up by a pharmacist from raw materials, rather than the usual factory production. Often resulting in less predicatable potencies, and notorious for other problems, but if you are left with no choice.

The moral, don't have multiple inconveniences come at once, as the big disasters are often founded on a number of small things going wrong together, and cross your fingers I don't have a puncture whilst I've got no spare, and no mobile phone.

The way to fight it is to have systems that are more predictable, and more robust, and not to put systematic blocks on things that are perfectly reasonable, like fulfilling prescriptions are a pharmacist in another country. Laws are especially bad for these kind of things, because with software, and company systems, if you don't like it you can change software (or fix it if you have the source, or other tools), or switch provider, Laws and governments on the other hand are harder to change.

Recommended reading "Feet of Clay" by Terry Pratchett.