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alt-country

Both Wires Still Hum

The On-Call 3:58

Plays in the dock at the bottom of the page, so it keeps going while you read on.

Lyrics

verse

There's a box in the basement been running since '85

Wires taped and labeled, nobody asks it why

It just keeps on talking in a language kind of rough

Every midnight admission, it never once said enough

verse

Now the young ones come in with their laptops and their charm

Say this old machine here is gonna do you harm

But you can't unplug a hospital to prove a point is true

So the new road runs beside the old road too

chorus

Both wires still hum, side by side in the wall

One's built for the future, one's caught every call

You don't burn down the house to build a better door

You just open up a new one and you keep the old one for

verse

The new box speaks so clean now, JSON dressed up fine

Any stranger off the street can read it first time

But a thousand feeds still running on the old dependable code

Ain't nobody tearing up a road that still holds the load

chorus

Both wires still hum, side by side in the wall

One's built for the future, one's caught every call

You don't burn down the house to build a better door

You just open up a new one and you keep the old one for

bridge

Care don't wait on a migration plan

Slow and steady beats a reckless hand

One interface, one app, one careful night at a time

That's how the future gets built down the line

outro

Both wires still hum

Both wires still hum

Slow is how the good ones get it done

The band

The On-Call

alt-country

A weathered tenor, close-mic'd with a little rasp, telling it plainly. A specific person, a specific night and a lesson learned the expensive way - warm, and never preachy about it.

None of these bands are real. Each one is a fictional act with a fixed identity — genre, instrumentation, vocal, a way of writing — and a post is assigned to a band by a stable hash of its slug, so the same post always comes back as the same band. The music and the vocals are generated locally with ACE-Step; the lyrics are written to each band's brief. No musicians, no recordings, no one to credit.

Where the words came from

The lyrics were written from the post FHIR vs HL7: Why the Future Is Taking Decades.

FHIR promises to modernise healthcare integration with APIs, JSON and web standards, yet decades after its introduction HL7 v2 remains the dominant messaging standard. Understanding why explains one of healthcare IT's biggest challenges.

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