Dolores had the pump open on the bench with the back off and the little service screen glowing at her. The update had gone most of the way through before stopping and displaying a message she hadn’t ever seen before.
UPDATE PACKAGE NOT VERIFIED.
Low battery. Corrupt file. Somebody unplugged it. Those were the reasons. This was a new error.
She swapped the cable for the spare and ran it again. Same message, same place, ninety seconds in.
She pulled another pump off the rack, one she had closed out that morning, and tried the update on it.
Ninety seconds. Same message.
“Hmm. Interesting. That’s weird,” she said.
The shop was in the basement next to the loading dock. This morning, like so many others, it was her and forty-two square feet of bench with a rack of pumps waiting their turn. She had been coming down here to fix things like this for twenty-two years. She rarely saw anything new.
She picked up the pump and turned it over. A Plum A+, two lines through one cassette, nine and a half pounds with the battery in it, the asset tag on the underside curling at one corner. She tried it. It ran, it pumped, and made an alarm when you pressed the test alarm button. There was nothing wrong with it other than it wouldn’t accept the update.
She called ICU Medical.
The hold music was the same she’d been hearing for a decade. Their software felt like it was a decade old also. So much of the crap she dealt with in this hospital felt old, even though she had to update stuff all the time.
She pressed the speaker button on the phone and went back to work on the next pump on the rack. That one worked — check battery, seven minutes, closed — and she had started on the next one when she heard the generic greeting. “Hello. I’m Mary from ICU Medical Customer Service. How can I help you today?”
She explained it. Mary asked her to try it again.
“I’ve tried it three times.”
“And it’s the same error each time?”
“UPDATE PACKAGE NOT VERIFIED. Yes.”
Dolores heard typing. She waited patiently, having done this thousands of times.
“Is the device on the network?”
“It’s on my bench.”
More typing. Mary asked her to confirm the model, which she did, and the software version, which she did. After a minute, Mary said she was going to escalate the ticket. She asked Dolores for her number so someone could call her back.
“How long.”
“I couldn’t say.”
“Okay,” Dolores said. “Thanks.”
Terri came down at noon. Dolores assumed it was because Terri liked to visit her in the basement.
“Do I get my pump.”
“I have a different one for you today.”
“I want my normal one. I’m used to it.”
“That one is being difficult.”
Terri leaned on the doorframe. She had been up on four since six and it showed. “Difficult how?”
Dolores said, “It won’t take a software update.”
“Does it need one?”
Dolores had been wondering that herself. The software updates were rarely significant and often just changed the user interface in a way that made it harder to understand. She heard someone call this enshittification. She loved that phrase.
This pump was four versions back anyway.
“Not today,” she said.
“So can I have it.”
“Sure.”
She got a green tag out of the drawer and wrote the date and her initials and the words RUNNING — UPDATE PENDING, and handed the thing across the bench. Terri tucked it under one arm like a purse, said goodbye, and left.
Dolores watched her walk away, letting her mind drift to another place and time. Then she went and got the book off the shelf.
The book lived over the parts bins, third from the left. It was a hardbound quad-ruled notebook with a strip of tape on the spine that had the year on it and, under that, in smaller letters, 2. She had needed two of them this year.
She sat down and uncapped the pen and wrote the date, the asset tag, the model, and:
Update fails at ~90 sec. “UPDATE PACKAGE NOT VERIFIED.” 3 attempts, same point. New cable, same. Loaded same pkg to a second unit, same fail. Both devices otherwise normal. ICU case opened, no answer yet. Returned to 4W green-tagged, running, update pending.
She looked at it for a second and then added:
Never seen this message.
The hospital’s asset management system had eaten her entries twice, once years ago and once four years after that, when they migrated it, and both times the IT person said the data was there, it was just not displayed. Eventually, she gave up arguing about it. Now, she wrote things down, just like she did when she had started at this hospital so many years ago.
She capped the pen and put the book back on the shelf.
At two o’clock a monitor came down from six with a cracked bezel. Somebody had hit it with a bed.