Why Sears doesn’t want you to think computationally

Last September we bought a new dishwasher to replace the old one that had failed. It was a reluctant purchase. We’d actually gone a couple of years doing dishes by hand, partly because we’ve been so disappointed by the modern generation of appliances. When the salesman at Sears mentioned their free 5-year preventive maintenance program, though, we decided to opt in. The plan entitles you to an annual appointment with a dishwasher tech who will come by to inspect your machine and do what’s needed to keep it in good working order.

Stoves, dishwashers, and vacuum cleaners shouldn’t require this kind of life support. I’m not going to win that argument, but I can at least make effective use of the life support service. Doing so requires a bit of a hack, though. Why? Remembering something annually, on a certain date, for five years running, isn’t the sort of thing that humans do well. It’s a task that begs for automation.

Of course Sears could remind me, in September of 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015, about my dishwasher checkup. It would be easy for them to do. They’re a mega-corporation with a mighty IT department that can easily perform this feat of magic. But Sears doesn’t want to remind me. They’re betting that I’ll forget, as I’m sure most people do.

So they sounded quite surprised when I called yesterday, on the anniversary of my dishwasher purchase, to schedule my appointment. How did I do it? By casting this magic spell:

BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20110902
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20110903
RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;COUNT=5
SUMMARY:sears dishwasher
END:VEVENT

That’s an event recorded by my calendar program. It happened first on September 2, 2011, and will happen again yearly for five years. I cast my spell using Outlook but you can do the same thing using any calendar program: Google Calendar, Apple iCal, Hotmail Calendar, Lotus Notes, many others.

When I talk about iCalendar feeds in the context of the elmcity project, I tend to focus on the idea that these are data feeds, which they are. But iCalendar has a special property. Some of that data is actually code. In this example, here is the one line of code:

RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;COUNT=5

In iCalendar lingo, RRULE means recurrence rule. From Outlook’s or Google Calendar’s point of view the rule is a tiny program and they are the operating systems that run it. Here are some other RRULES that calendar applications enable you to express:

every Tuesday at 10AM

every first Sunday until October 2011

every September 2 for five years

You don’t have to do it this way. You can, instead, record each event separately. Even though calendar software makes it quite easy to define repeating events, I’ve got a hunch that in the dishwasher scenario a lot of people would use data (five discrete events) rather than code (one event that expands to five). Why? For the same reason that many people will manually adjust the font size used for every paragraph in a document, rather than creating a rule that governs all the paragraphs.

My list of core principles for web thinkers doesn’t yet include the idea of code that generates data. I’ve found it plenty challenging just to get people to think about the nature of their data, about how they do or don’t control it, and about how it does or doesn’t flow through networks.

But if we want everyone to be able to automate tasks that otherwise get done poorly or not at all, we probably do need to find a way to teach patterns like code-generated data and Don’t Repeat Yourself more broadly than just to students of computer and information sciences.

If you want to read a lovely short essay on calendar software and our relationship to the future, I highly recommend Paul Ford’s Tickler File Forever.