The Cases We Don't Design For

I spent part of this week talking about stores that no longer exist.

Foley’s.

Fresh Choice.

Robinsons-May.

The old Valley Fair before the expansions, before the luxury wing, before the place became something closer to a destination than a mall.

At first it felt like nostalgia. I remembered my first Foley’s credit card. I remembered shopping at Cottonwood Mall in Albuquerque. I remembered the Fresh Choice that occupied a corner of Valley Fair for only a short time before closing, leaving its sign hanging on the back of the building for years afterward.

The conversation drifted from department stores to online shopping, from online shopping to package delivery, and from package delivery to something else entirely.

A few weeks ago a Walmart order was marked as delivered but never arrived. The driver couldn’t access the building. The order disappeared somewhere between the warehouse and my front door.

The amount of money involved was small.

The inconvenience wasn’t.

When you have a car, a missing package is an annoyance. You drive to the store and replace what you need. When you don’t have a car, when you’re budgeting carefully, when replacing an item means rearranging the week’s plans, a small problem becomes something larger.

That observation led to another.

We often talk about convenience as though it were an unqualified improvement. Order from your phone. Receive it tomorrow. No trip required. No waiting in line.

Most of the time, that works exactly as advertised.

Until it doesn’t.

The package disappears. The tracking information is wrong. The delivery never arrives.

Every system fails occasionally. What interested me was something else. Many modern systems have become extraordinarily efficient at handling the ordinary case while becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the exception.

The old department stores weren’t better because they sold better shirts.

Most of them probably didn’t.

What they offered was something harder to measure.

A return that didn’t quite fit the policy might still be accepted. A confusing receipt could be sorted out by someone willing to spend a few minutes understanding what happened. A problem could occasionally be solved by a person rather than a procedure.

At the time, that felt ordinary.

Now it feels increasingly rare.

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As the conversation continued, examples began appearing everywhere. Mortgage lending. Hiring. Banking. Media. Customer service.

The details changed.

The pattern remained.

Modern systems excel at recognizing categories.

They struggle with context.

That isn’t a criticism. It’s largely the reason these systems scale. A mortgage lender cannot manually evaluate every application. A recruiter cannot spend an hour with every resume. A bank cannot investigate every unusual transaction.

The volume is too large.

Rules become models.

Models become automation.

Automation becomes process.

The trade makes sense.

Most of the time.

The difficulty appears when a person no longer fits the model.

A resume contains an employment gap.

An applicant’s income arrives from unusual sources.

A customer’s circumstances don’t fit the predefined options.

A file contains details that resist simplification.

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This week I found myself on the receiving end of one of those reviews.

I opened an account at a credit union I didn’t particularly need. I already have a credit union. I have local branches. I have checking and savings accounts that work perfectly well.

The application was driven more by curiosity than necessity.

The account was opened.

Then it was flagged.

An auditor called.

We talked through police reports, account inquiries, and a chain of events that neither of us could reduce to a simple explanation.

She disagreed with part of my interpretation.

She also wasn’t willing to let an automated process make the final decision.

The account may ultimately be closed.

The outcome remains uncertain.

What stayed with me was not the outcome.

It was the conversation.

For half an hour, I wasn’t a category.

I was a case.

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The same week, more than a dozen recruiters viewed my LinkedIn profile without a single conversation.

I don’t blame them.

Recruiters operate inside systems too. They see an employment gap. They see self-employment. They see a timeline that doesn’t match expectations.

What they don’t see is the story behind it.

The challenge isn’t that anyone made a bad decision.

The challenge is that no decision was ever made at all.

That tension exists far beyond banking and hiring.

We see it in news feeds that optimize for engagement rather than understanding. We see it in customer service systems designed to answer common questions while struggling with unusual ones. We see it in organizations that become so focused on consistency that they lose their ability to accommodate exceptions.

The irony is that most of us celebrate those efficiencies right up until the moment we become the exception ourselves.

Then everything changes.

The package goes missing.

The career takes an unexpected turn.

A medical diagnosis arrives.

A bankruptcy appears.

Life introduces circumstances that were never anticipated by the model.

Suddenly we find ourselves hoping there is a human somewhere in the process.

Not because humans are always right.

Not because judgment guarantees a favorable outcome.

Because judgment leaves room for context.

A healthy society needs efficient systems.

Scale matters.

Consistency matters.

Rules matter.

The question is whether we leave any room for the cases we didn’t design for.

Most of us spend our lives benefiting from systems optimized for the ordinary.

Then something happens.

A package disappears.

A career changes course.

A life takes a shape no designer anticipated.

Suddenly the exception is no longer theoretical.

It’s us.