Twisty Logic
January 25, 2008
I live in a hollow in rural Kentucky. The big city newspaper is The Courier-Journal, and I look at it every day, and I even read a story or two. The January 25, 2008, edition ran a story called “Comair Passengers Blamed in Crash.” The story by Tom Loftus contained the phrase contributory negligence. This phrase might be useful or not too useful if you find yourself taking your search engine vendor to court.
The phrase contributory negligence is used in the context of a tragic air craft mishap in Lexington, Kentucky. The attorney defending the airline in the matter “has claimed that passengers were partly to blame for their own deaths in the August 2006 crash…” The logic is that passengers knew the weather was bad and that the runway was under construction.
According to the article, the attorney did not include this argument in his defense of his client.
The notion that a vendor can blame the customer for failure is an interesting idea, and it is one that, I must admit, I had not considered. In Kentucky, this logic makes sense. But when you have a million dollar investment in a search system, you may want to make sure that you document your experience with the search system.
If you don’t or you take short cuts in the implementation, you might find yourself on the wrong side of the logic that asserts you — the customer — caused the problem. The vendor wins.
You can read the full Courier-Journal story here. The Web site rolls off older stories, so you might encounter a dead link. Hurry. The story was still live at 9 30 pm, Friday, January 25, 2008.
Stephen Arnold, January 25, 2008
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