by Serguey Shinder
In 2024 we replaced the system our trade counters had used since 2006. The old one ran on terminals with green text on a black screen, and the people who knew it well could take a full order without touching a mouse, typing product codes from memory faster than the customer could read them out. The new one runs in a browser, shows pictures and stock at nearby branches, and went to our fifty branches in two phases.
After the first phase, the complaints arrived. Order entry felt slower. Staff missed their shortcuts. I had used the old system for fifteen years, and I agreed with every complaint. In the steering meeting before phase two I argued for a three month pause. The old system, I said, was quicker, it never went down, and new starters picked it up in no time. I believed all three.
Our operations analyst, who had joined in 2022 and never used the old system, asked whether she could check them before we decided. A week later she brought back the records.
The old system had gone down thirty one times in its last four years, usually for an hour or two, and twice for most of a day. I had been in the room for some of those and had forgotten all of them. New starters took about six weeks before they were trusted on the counter alone, because they had to learn hundreds of codes and commands. On the new system it was four days. And the speed I remembered was real, but only for perhaps a quarter of the staff. Across everybody, the average time to take an order on the new system was already slightly shorter than on the old one, and still falling.
What I had been defending was not the system. It was my own fluency in it. Fifteen years had made the old screens feel effortless to me, and memory had done the rest, keeping the effortless mornings and quietly dropping the outages, the training and the colleagues who never got fast. Familiar had felt like good, and I had not noticed the difference because there was nothing in my head to measure against.
Phase two went ahead on time. We kept the one thing the complaints had right, and added keyboard shortcuts for the twenty most common actions, which closed most of the gap for the experienced staff.
I have a rule for myself now. When I hear myself say the old way was better, about anything, I go and find a record of the old way before I say it in a meeting. Sometimes I turn out to be right. More often the record is less flattering than my memory.
The past feels better than it was because we remember being good at it, and forget what it cost everybody else.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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