I was waiting for my bus at this bus-stop beside the AMK MRT station. This stop has a display board which tells you when the next bus will come. The board said my bus had arrived. The bus probably belongs to Wonder Woman because I couldn’t see the bus at all.
Anyway, I was thinking how this iris ( Intelligent Route Information System ) sucked when I realized the people who implemented it probably already knew it was going to be bad in accurately reporting the arrival times.
How did I arrive at the above conclusion?
They named the system with the acronym iris.
Iris was a messenger-goddess who rode rainbows between heaven and earth to deliver messages from Olympus.
I wonder if it was by pure coincidence that iris is the name of a goddess who was a messenger for the gods. No matter. I think the implementors of the system were already hinting to us the effectiveness of their bus-tracking-time-reporting system by using a girl’s name.
Seriously, when has a girl who said she will be done in five minutes ever got done in five minutes.
Daphne Maia | 09-Apr-08 at 9:52 pm | Permalink
sexist!! haha. true, but only when it comes to getting dressed to go out.
hmmm. anyway i find iris pretty accurate. for me, anyway. the bus usually comes within 2 minutes of the time that iris ‘guessed’.
Daily SG: 10 Apr 2008 « The Singapore Daily | 10-Apr-08 at 12:14 pm | Permalink
[...] Transport Reformed? Same ol’, same ol’ - Darth Grievous’ Dark Domain 鸟话连篇: An April Fool’s Joke - One Week Late - Ian On The Red Dot: I Finally Realized SBS Transit’s Intelligent Route Information System Was Meant To Suck [...]
40s | 10-Apr-08 at 1:00 pm | Permalink
Don’t even care if iris is there. What can you do if it tells you your bus is coming in 15 min time?
We are obsessed with all these IT and info. stuff that are of no value.
Cost of public transpot will go up again once iris is fully implemented to provide “better service”.
I think many of us have forgotten what is the objective of public transpot…. Basically, it is to move people (general public) from a point to the another at the shortest time and lowest cost, that why it is called PUBLIC transpot.
jack | 10-Apr-08 at 2:16 pm | Permalink
Now, the question is who’s bright idea was it? Is this guy still around? Who got the contract to do it, local or foreign? Remember the Singapore Power incident? Their IT contractors screwed up big time with the billing system. Wonder what happened to the lawsuit now?
I hope that no one forgotten about this case.