I feel the underlying issue with a lot of these things is that no one seems to trust anyone, so nothing can be done "outside the system". As you say, the soluti

I feel the underlying issue with a lot of these things is that no one seems to trust anyone, so nothing can be done "outside the system". As you say, the solution for these kind of outages are easy: just write some stuff down on paper and enter it later. But good heavens, we can't let people just enter data! Every possible avenue of abuse or mistakes must be covered. Second problem is ill-designed systems which don't take exceptions in to account. Sometimes because of the preceding reason, sometimes just "oops, we didn't think of that".