In this hospital, intensive care unit (ICU) nurses would occasionally work in the ER. We went to the ICU, which had only the new style of heart monitors, and interviewed four ICU nurses. Two of those nurses said that the default heart rate alarms on ER monitors were automatically set when the monitor power was turned on. This suggests that the nurse in question was simply the operator of a system that failed but the mistake could have been made by an ICU nurse as well. A literature search for similar events yielded at least two publications that warned of the possibility of errors when two systems that had with different methods for setting alarms were mixed. However, these warnings never filtered down to the registry nurse or the ER staff. To prevent a future event, the ER added a label under each of the alarm buttons that directed nurses to push the button to activate the alarm. The hospital also updated nurse orientation training material and to the operating manual for the monitor itself with a note explaining the need to push a button to activate alarms. The hospital also developed a long-term plan to replace the older monitors. One interesting aspect of this case is that if a “no code” had been placed on the patient’s chart, no Code Blue response would have been necessary. The death of the patient would have been a non-event, and the failure of the nurse to set the alarms might have gone unnoticed. In addition, when the nurse checked the monitoring system to determine why the alarm had failed, she noted that the monitor clock was an hour behind real time. She said she believed that if the clock was wrong, the system must not have been functioning properly