So often I assume a process is totally automated, but a lot of the time I should be more empathetic, because there is a person in the loop and they are usually

So often I assume a process is totally automated, but a lot of the time I should be more empathetic, because there is a person in the loop and they are usually just trying to keep the system they inherited from blowing up. They have no time to fix it. This illustrates something that I think a lot of us in the "computer industry" often misunderstand. We see a mass email system (or anything happening at scale) and assume the whole thing is automated, because that's how we would do it. Too often a system is cobbled together, only barely works, and is only semi-automated. Even something that is 99% automated but generates thousands of actions per day ends up creating a high workload for a human. I've even seen where my email address was clearly hand-typed from a form (not even copy/paste), because I usually sign up for website accounts using Gmail's plus feature. I created an account at Website A with the address "myemail+websitea@gmail.com" and then received an email a day layer sent to "myemail+wesbitea@gmail.com" which Gmail still delivered because they ignore everything after the plus sign. The only way that error happens is if someone typed it by hand. [Plus emails are a great way to find out which companies sell your info to spammers. Most of the time nobody bothers to run a regex to fix "plus" addresses into the original address, so the evidence of data selling ends up right in the email header.] I feel sorry for the person that is eventually going to have RSI because they hand-type the entire list from their web form into their email software.