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Nathanael DuMont
English 101
Professor Bolton
20 February 2012
Last Holiday: The Imperfection of Machines
The Last Holiday, starring Queen Latifah, is about Georgia Byrd, a woman who is led to believe
by her company’s doctor that she has a rare disease called Lampington’s Disease. The doctor tells her
that she only had three days to live. Before this discovery, Georgia has lived a quiet life, always dreaming
but never doing. She even keeps a “Possibilities” book in where she puts those dreams down. When
she finds out about her impending death, she says, “you wait and you wait for something big to happen,
and then you find out you gonna die.” She apparently is not going to wait anymore, because she buys a
plane ticket to Europe and starts creating experiences of a lifetime. At the end of the film, after she has
everything she has wanted, she finds out that she has been misdiagnosed due to the machine being
faulty. The film shows that humans depend too much on technology and do not consider that the
machines have defects. I agree that humans depend way too entirely on machines and think they are
always right, when, in fact, they have and still can produce error.
These days, people rely way too much on machines, and sometimes don’t consider the fact that
they may be wrong. People assume that the machine can’t mess up and accept the first result made by
the machine almost right away. The GPS navigation system, for example, is one of the technologies that
most people assume are always right. However, the GPS, if not updated, could in fact be incorrect at
times. It may tell the person using it to turn onto a street, and, instead, they find themselves in
someone else’s driveway due to recent development changes. The GPS system must be updated to give
accurate directions. The same goes for the machine the doctor used in this film. If he had checked and

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updated it, he would have found error to it much sooner, and most likely avoided the situation with
Georgia.
Trusting in one machine, especially one not used much by the doctor, should be questioned
when it diagnoses someone with a serious disease. The doctor clearly states in the movie that they had
just gotten that machine in for use, so it was fairly new. She should have gone to a second or third
doctor and gotten another test to make sure there wasn’t a mistake. However, she accepted the first
diagnosis that she was given right away. This misdiagnosis allowed her to be spontaneous and not let
things happen, but she believed she was on the brink of death in that state of mind. She might have
cleared up the situation if she had gotten diagnosed by more than one doctor. People who are
misdiagnosed with such a serious illness as Georgia’s should have received more than one review and by
many other doctors.
There are many people who do not update their machines and put too much reliance on the
technology of it. An example would be security systems. Alarms have been known to go off at
numerous offices and buildings for no particular reason. If the alarms are not kept up with, they
become faulty and start going off for no reason. The machine in this movie was the same way. The
doctor did not keep up with it and did not use it a lot, so the machine gave a false report. Machines can
produce error to begin with, but if they are not up to date, then they have a greater chance of giving a
wrong outcome.
Machines that are used every day, such as auto pilots on aircrafts, have to be used and tested
frequently so that the effectiveness of the system works. If the engineer decided that checking on the
aircraft regularly was unimportant, the plane has a greater chance of having something go wrong with it,
and could potential crash when many lives are at stake. It is vital to check on technology such as this
because it could easily turn into a catastrophic event otherwise.

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I believe that technology is an excellent source of finding answers and supplies us with much
needed information, but, if it’s as critical as death, the situation should be looked over multiple times
instead of trusting in the one and only result that is given. People have become too dependent on the
technology of today. Machines are known to have glitches in their system, yet people tend to just trust
them one-hundred and ten percent. Machines can also be tampered with, and bugs can enter the
system. Many people could be misdiagnosed today because they are as folly as Ms. Georgia Byrd was in
the film. Although it had a good outcome for her, in real life, the situation may not be as happy as her
ending.
The film, Last Holiday, had a point of machines and technology not always being the most
definite error. The machines can create error and mess up, so we should not immediately accept the
outcome that they give the first time around. I agree that most times the machines are accurate, but,
just as there is human error, technology can show us error as well.

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Work Cited
Last Holiday. Dir. Wayne Wang. Perf. Queen Latifah, LL Cool J, and Timothy Hutton. Paramount Pictures,
2006. Film.