Festivities Falter as Vista Steps Back to the Future

It was to have been a grand display of computerized convenience: North County residents can now avoid a long drive to San Diego and instead go to the Vista courthouse to get, by way of state-of-the-art technology, certified copies of birth, death and marriage certificates.

Wowzers! A computer terminal is linked to the mother computer in San Diego--where more than 1.5 million birth, death and marriage certificates are on computer file. And a state-of-the-art laser printer is set up in Vista, so the record can be officially reprinted in, say, three seconds.

Supervisor John MacDonald was there. So was County Recorder Vera Lyle and County Clerk Robert Zumwalt and a bunch of other high-ranking bureaucrats looking sharp in their dark-blue power suits. There was a county photographer, a ribbon to cut, even the first customer in line, wanting her son’s birth certificate.

A clerk sat at the keyboard and typed in the appropriate code. The screen remained blank.

And, for the next 40 minutes, the screen stayed that way, blank. Clerks punched in different letters and codes on the keyboard. Lyle, ribbon-cutting scissors still in hand, fidgeted with a cable. Someone else turned the machine off, and on, and off, and on again.

Blank screen.

Two high-ranking managers each got on separate telephones to computer technicians in San Diego. They talked about mainframes and host computers and how the whole system was “down.”

Lyle fidgeted some more with the cable.

The customer was handed a piece of paper to fill out her request the old-fashioned way, just in case. “We can mail her the certificate in a day or so,” a bureaucrat grumbled.

Lyle fidgeted some more with the cable.

Finally, the computer screen came on.

At about the same time, a courthouse electrician moseyed into the Superior Court clerk’s office in Vista and saw all the commotion. He walked over to the computer.

“It hasn’t worked for 40 minutes,” someone sighed to him.

“Yeah, I know,” he said.

Huh?

“I had all the computers ‘down’ so I could work on the controllers,” he said, speaking computer-talk. “I was doing something for the marshal’s office. It was on the log, that the computers would be down.”

“But we had this big ceremony today!” a bureaucrat in a nice suit moaned.

“No one told me ,” the computer tech said.

Georginne Smith finally got her son’s laser-printed birth certificate and smiled.

Lyle, the county recorder smiled.

Annette Evans, the chief deputy county recorder, smiled. Last year countywide, she said, 83,000 copies of records were made--and more than 20,000 will probably be made in Vista this year for people who don’t want to drive to downtown San Diego.

But call first and make sure the computers aren’t down.