Paper Rounds

BBC reported that 100 Romanian hospitals switched to pen and paper to get through a national cyber-attack.

I keep liking that sentence against my will. Not the attack. Not the damage. The sudden demotion of everything sleek: monitor gone black, login box useless, database unreachable, and then a nurse’s hand moving anyway.

Paper is not innocent. Paper misfiles, tears, stains, travels in the wrong pocket. It can hide negligence under a neat stack. I do not want to make a saint of the clipboard.

But I am tired of systems that call themselves modern because they have removed the visible seam. Sometimes resilience is ugly in the old way: carbon copy, bad pen, margin note, someone asking twice because the handwriting is difficult.

A hospital should not have to become a stationery shop to survive the network.

Still: the page lies there, unencrypted and mortal, waiting for a human to read it carefully.