HiddenMysteries: Bring Back the Books!

Robert A. Franco

I love technology. But you have to know its limitations and it is certainly not the best solution for every problem.

Case in point, the computers in our home county are down today because the examiners noticed that not everything was coming up when they searched the records. They would search for name and the results would indicate that there were 33 records found. However, when they tried to look at them, only 2 would appear. In other situation, they were searching for names that they knew should have had results and it would indicate 'none found'.

When this was brought to the attention of the clerks, they said "yes, we are aware of the problem and we are working on it." But, they didn't bother to tell any of the examiners working in their office. How many people missed documents and didn't realize it? There is no way to know.

The clerk isn't even sure when the problem with the ACS indexing system started. Therefore, all of the searches done the past few days are now suspect. Unfortunately, those are already in the hands of the clients and closing. Will the examiner get the blame for any missing mortgages - you bet! Once the system is working properly again, there will be no record of which records were affected - they don't even know that. They have no explanation for why some records show up and others don't.

We didn't have this problem with the book indexes. Once it was written in the index it was there, reliably, day after day. This isn't the first time we have had problems in this county with mysterious 'disappearing' and 'reappearing' of records in the computer index. That begs the question, how many times has it happened that nobody is aware of? That is certainly a scary thought.

So... what was the point on spending thousands of dollars for a computer system that is less reliable than the cheap old pen and paper, book indexing systems that worked extremely well for hundreds of years? It reminds me of the millions of dollars NASA spent on developing a pen that would write in zero gravity so astronauts could write in space. What was wrong with using a 10 cent pencil??

About the author:

Robert A. Franco has been in the title industry for nearly 15 years in the state of Ohio. The owner of VersaTitle, a full service abstracting and title company, and the founder and president of Source of Title, a Web site devoted to providing media and marketing services to the title industry, Franco has dedicated much of his professional career to furthering the role and significance of title examiners in the title insurance industry...

http://www.davickservices.com

Bring Back the Books!

Friday, June 08 2007 @ 01:01 PM CDT