World Cup Cricket

I was watching the cricket this afternoon and it reminded me of the time I worked in a call centre selling tickets for the 1998 Cricket World Cup. The main centre for getting tickets was at Lords and it was soon apparent that they couldn't cope with demand. People were hanging on the phone for hours trying to get through, and there was a real danger that the matches would be played before the tickets could be sold. Something had to be done.
I had a call from an agency asking me to turn up at a location in Market Harborough where I would be trained ready for going live the next day.
This was the first time I'd worked in a call centre so I was interested to find out how it worked.
The computer programme was fairly straight forward to use and we were soon up and running. The phone would ring in my ear and I'd find out what match the person wanted tickets for. Tickets were finite and many matches had sold out. We mostly had games featuring the smaller nations like Bangladesh, Kenya, Ireland and Holland in provincial grounds. All games featuring England and India were sold out and we had only one Pakistan game with unsold tickets.
I won't bore you with details of how the process worked. I've worked in a number of inbound call centres since then, selling magazine subscriptions and booking engineers for photocopiers. They all use versions of the same software, so if you've seen one, you've seen them all.

I did learn one important thing regarding Indians and Pakistanis. I'm not being racist, just telling you what happened.
If someone rang asking about a game featuring India and they were told that it had sold out they expressed dissapointment and rang off.
If someone rang about a Pakistan game and I said that it had sold out, they wouldn't accept it. Are you sure? You don't have one or two left? I can pay a bit extra etc, etc. It's as if it's built into their culture that tickets can always be obtained with a little backsheesh.
They wouldn't take no for an answer. If I said there weren't any tickets they would take it as a personal affront, as if their money, their offer of backsheesh wasn't good enough.
There was one Pakistan game that had some tickets. We were told that tickets were limited to two only per caller, so we had the spectacle of the buyer asking for ten or twenty tickets and being told no. Then they said can my brother/sister/auntie have two tickets? I checked and was told that they could if they came to the phone and ordered them in "person". So another voice would then buy two tickets for his brother, another voice would buy two for his sister, then his auntie/uncle/cousin/grandmother all had two. Once he had his ten or twenty tickets they'd all be paid for with one credit card.
Specially obtained to buy tickets for the World Cup.
The tickets were specially printed with the buyer's name, but when people in the same family are called Hussein or Ahmed or Mohammed who knew if the tickets were genuinely for family members or to be touted outside the ground?

We never had this problem with the Indians, only with the Pakistanis.
Maybe if there were tickets available for Indian matches I might have a different view but my opinion of the two nations was definitely shaped by my time selling World Cup tickets.

Working for the Government -part two

 A few years ago I was employed as a temp to enter all the flood defence data on to the National Flood Defence database. I've explained how I was recruited at short notice from a local employment agency, despite the fact that the EA had contracted with Reed International to supply all their temporary staff. I also explained how unworkable and unsatisfactory the arrangement was, as Reed offices are usually in a different town to where the job was situated, meaning that local staff were unlikely to be given the job.
I was employed on minimum wage and I had no spare time or money to travel to another town to register for work (at minimum wage). In reality the national minimum wage is also the national maximum wage. You can't run a household and a car on minimum wage, so having a national agreement in place is the worst possible option when trying to get people back into work and getting work done and meeting your own targets.
Reed had to take up my references, but I argued that I was already working at the EA anyway, and had been for some weeks, so why shouldn't I continue to work there? Then there was the small matter of the deadline for uploading all the data, the reason why I was engaged in the first place.
So I went back to work at the EA while my references were checked out. In the meantime the agency had sent a new temp along to help. He was considered the very best they could find. He was useless, but then I was biased. However, he was unable to match our work rate even after a couple of day's training. As I said, the job required tenacity, accuracy and intense concentration and my co-worker was sadly lacking. It didn't help that he lived miles and miles away and his transport was unreliable.
(Back to the same problem of paying minimum wage. There's no money for keeping your car up to scratch. Yet another disincentive to work.)
As the days passed, we began to see the light. The pile of work slowly began to diminish. We were going to upload all the data in the time required. My boss rang around the neighbouring regions to see how they were doing. Their answer astounded me.


No they hadn't made much progress in getting the data online. No they weren't making any special effort. Yes they were going to miss the deadline set by the government. No they had no intention of meeting it at any time soon.


So much for government targets.


I now began to see how the public sector works. I began to see that setting targets is unproductive, costly and gives a totally false picture of what is actually happening.

Basically there are three options.

One is to stop doing your normal work and divert all your resources to producing the evidence required by central government that you are hitting your targets.
In the case of my little backwater of the EA, it would have meant taking all the field satff off the job of repairing and improving flood defences and sitting them in an office entering the data on to the computer. Data which is basically useless in the event of a flood. Flood defences are what's needed, not lines on a map.
Option one is the one favoured by someone looking for promotion. Look good in the eyes of Head Office and bugger the workers and the public.  Produce glossy plans and charts that look good but betray the reality.

Option two was to continue to work on the flood defences, utilising the staff according to their strengths, and updating the data as and when time allowed. This also creates a false picture of the situation, but in a positive way. The defences are probably better than as marked on a plan. This is not the way to go if you want promotion.

Option three is to bring in people to update the data while the regular staff do the job they were hired to do. The problem with this approach is that the quality of staff is variable, the training patchy, and the rush to hit the deadline outweighs the need to enter the data correctly. It's also very expensive.

And the final option, one that is used over and over again. In my office there were a couple of men who were working on technical drawings for various flood defences. They worked on a draughtsman's table producing plans in the old fashioned way. I chatted to one when I had a break one day. He used to work for the EA or one of its predecessors but had been made redundant when the EA was re-organised. The re-organisation left them without anyone to make the deatiled drawings that are vital for any work to be done. What did they do? they re-hired the draughtsman, this time as a consultant at a vastly inflated daily rate. So he came back, sat at the same desk and did exactly the same job as he did before, but this time with a big smile on his face. He was his own boss, earning a fortune compared to his earlier salary, and if he fancied a day off he could take it. Nice work if you can get it.

We made the deadline. We were the only office in the whole of the UK to do so.
We were the only office to hit the government's target.
Guess which office got into trouble?

Anyway, my job was done. I heard that another department needed a temporary worker so i approached them and found myself work to last another three weeks or so.

Reed International. Useless. I'd never recommend them to anyone.

Working for the Government

I've not posted for the last few weeks as there's been an election followed by week away on holiday.


And I had nothing to write about.
But that hasn't stopped me in the past so here goes.


I briefly worked for the Environment agency about five years ago. It taught me all I need to know about how the government sets targets, allocates resources and gives contracts. In short, it's rubbish.
The Environment Agency was formed from the Anglia Water Authority and National Rivers Authority amonst other agencies. It sought to bring a whole raft of differing organisations with different responsibilities under one roof. The government did  a similar thing when it combined the Inland Revenue with Customs & Excise and created a body that managed to lose all the good aspects and retain the bad bits of both agencies. I suspect that the same thing happened with the Environment Agency.
In 1996 there were really bad floods in Northampton. It turned out that the flood defences were so bad as to be useless. A lot of money had to be spent putting that right and then the government called for a nationwide survey of every flood defence, and for that information to be put on a national database that could be accessed on the internet. All this had to be done in addition to the everyday work.
So how do they assess the flood defences? They send their staff out to walk the riverbank and measure the height, angle, constuction methods etc of every river bank. These were entered on to paper plans and then entered on the computer database.
As usual, the government set a target for this to be accomplished. The order went out from Whitehall that the whole country's flood defences be available to view online by such and such a date.
It was an impossible task, given the manpower available and the pressure of actually repairing the banks and creating flood protection areas, rather than merely measuring them.
You see the same problem in the NHS, in Education, the Police. All have targets that must be achieved, so the staff spend all their time filling in forms and only doing the work that is relevant to making their targets.

I'd been looking for work for about three weeks. My last job was entering data for a Supermarket chain's distribution depot. The company's promotional allocations were on a separate database to the stores orders, so I entered the quantities from one database to the other so that they could be picked and sent out in one load rather than two. It was not a hard job, but needed speedy and accurate keyboard skills, which I'd learned almost forty years beforehand.


One day I received a call from a local employment agency asking if I was available to work the next day. I was, so I turned up at the local Environment Agency offices, where my job was explained to me.
It was quite complicated, but nowhere near as complicated as working Cubase music software, so I was able to get up to speed quite quickly. I'd be given a pile of A4 sheets that related to a stretch of riverbank, then I'd download the relevant master data from the national database. I'd enter the data from the sheets to the database and once I'd completed the set, I'd upload the amended data to the national database.
I will say that not everyone can do this. It required a high degree of accuracy and attention to detail, as well as working to a tight deadline. But that was what I was used to, having come from a banking and FMCG background
(FMCG= Fast Moving Consumer Goods)
The deadline loomed ever closer. My boss and I were the only staff available to enter the data. To be honest, you could never get a man who'd spent all his life outdoors maintaining water courses to have the computer skills to transfer his data in an office environment. Any more than you could have asked me to survey the riverbanks for the data.


It was then that we encountered a snag. While it was OK for my boss to have a temp, he could only get that temp from the approved supplier, which was Reed International. I wasn't registered with them. I had to take a day off and travel to Northampton to register and be interviewed for the job I'd been doing with a great deal of success for a couple of weeks. I had to give references which had to be checked up. I went along with it reluctantly.


Here I was, a temporary worker on minimum wage having to travel to another town at my own expense to register for a job in my own town. If I wanted to work in Northampton I'd have registered there. My boss said that they'd asked Reed for temporarary staff months before but they'd been unable to find any, and yet he'd rung a local agency who provided a first class temp (me) the next day. He shook his head, saying that the government had a policy of using local business wherever possible, but that it was thwarted by their insistence of centralised accounts, who refused to allow local businesses to compete. There had to be central buying, which accounts for why a post-it pad costs ten times from the approved supplier than what you could buy it for in the high street.

False economics.
On a national scale, it may make sense for one firm to supply all the temporary staff, if all that mattered was sending out one cheque instead of hundreds. But unless the agency has an office near every government office, it is useless. If you go to Scotland or Cornwall teh problem is even more magnified. If a government office in Penzance needs a temp and their chosen agency is in Bristol, or Taunton,or Exeter, or Plymouth, or Bodmin or even Truro, they will have a long wait to get one.
The whole idea of temporary staff is their availability at short notice, their flexibility and versatility.

As usual, the government got the worst of the deal.

(to be continued)

Modulus eleven

 

I've been lying in bed thinking about modulus eleven. Why? and what is it, you may ask. I just looked it up on the internet and read through the description and I'm as mystified now as I was forty years ago. It's to do with why your bank account number has those particular numbers, and why bar codes work.

Part of my duties as a junior bank clerk was to allocate account numbers to new accounts.You couldn't just  choose any old number. We had a printout containing the available numbers. I noticed that consecutive account numbers were about eight numbers apart. For instance, if an account number ended in 08, then the next number in the sequence would be 16. Usually.

I was told that the last number in the account number acted as a check number for the whole number. Then they uttered the magic phrase "Modulus eleven".

It meant that if you mis-punched an account number, the machine refused to accept it, which cut down the likelihood of applying a credit or debit to the wrong account, or  consigning a credit to limbo.

I was thinking about this because the last few days I've been trying to describe the work I did as a junior bank clerk all those years ago, and I've now realised that although the cheques went through the clearing house and were somehow sorted into branch order, so that we only received our own cheques, they didn't get posted against the customer's account until the cheque arrived in the branch. And that was our job using a Burroughs punch tape machine.

The keyboard was much as the others that I have described. It was loaded with computer paper, very wide, with guide holes on each side, and faint (feint?) lines printed on the paper to help guide the eye.

The machine would only accept genuine account numbers (modulus eleven again), so we'd set the machine for either debit (cheques), or credits. Everything that was punched in found its way onto the punchtape (the soft copy) or the computer paper (the hard copy).

When punching in a batch of cheques, you'd be given a pile of cheques and a total for the batch. You'd punch in the account number, the cheque number and the amount. All that information was punched into the tape by making holes that could be read by a mechanical reader. 

Many years later I was friends with a man who collected player pianos. The tune to be played was created by making holes in a roll of paper, like this-

Exactly the same idea as computer punch tape, but one hundred years older.

I use computer technology in my recording studio. Some studios "programme" the music using a sequencer. The music roll unwound vertically, but the sequencer unrolls (scrolls) horizontally across the screen

But exactly the same principle.

Anyway, you'd work your way through the batch, get to the end and press the total key. The moment of truth. Did your total match the amount you were given? If it did, you'd start on the next batch. If not, you had to find the error. The machine couldn't be used until the error was cleared.

All this was played out against a strict deadline. You soon got good at machining, and even better at finding errors. That skill stays with you.

Proofreading? No problem.

Batch data entry? Easy peasy.

And modulus eleven? It's still in use today. Without it, bank account numbers wouldn't be secure. Without it, there's be no bar codes. You don't need to know how it works, only that it does.

Machine skills

This was the keypad I learned to use when they sent me away to learn machine skills back in 1968.

 

As you can see, there are a few more keys to use, but it's simple once you know how.

From the left hand side, the first nine columns are for pounds, the next two light coloured columns are for shillings, and the right hand column and a bit are for pence, so you can enter up to £999,999,999-19-11d in one go. Each column has buttons marked 1 to 9.

Operating it is a doddle. press the keys corresponding to the each item you want to add, eg £110-9-6 and pull the lever. repeat as needed and the total is in the little windows at the bottom (shown as white dots in the photo. Sorry but pictures of these ancient machines are hard to find)

The amount can be entered using one finger, but speed comes when you use all your fingers to depress the keys in one movement. It's easy to stretch your hands so that they can cover all the keys. The next thing to learn is to read the amount to be entered as one figure. The human brain can read long combinations of letters and recognise them as words, and it can read long combinations of numbers as well.

So you look at the amount and not at the keyboard. You use the mark on the 5 button to guide your fingers and you see the amount and form the shape of the number and press. The illustration I used is for a mechanical version that needed a crank handle to operate. There were electric versions where you touched the motor bar with your little finger to record the amount. With practice it was amazing how quickly one could list cheques, and the skill never leaves you.

Imagine a mechanical machine that consisted of a keyboard like this-

 

and this keyboard surrounded by an array of metal boxes (you can just make out a couple of them in the picture). Anything up to two dozen different boxes. Each of these boxes has the electro-mechanical equivalent of the operating handle in the earlier machine (see above).

This is an NCR Proof Machine, a noisy, clanking whirring monster of a machine that sorted all the cheques that had been paid in into the different banks. One box for Barclays, another for Lloyds, etc. There were a lot more banks in the 1960s. The Westminster Bank and the National Provincial banks merged to form the Natwest bank in the late 1960s. Many other famous names disappeared at the same time. At the end of the day's business, each bank's cheques were tallied up and sent to the Central clearing house. Each bank would present bundles of cheques and receive cheques back. The cheques physically changed hands. Those cheques were then sorted into branches and sent to each branch to be cleared. That's why it took a week for the cheque to be cleared. Two days to arrive at the drawer's branch, one day to be accepted, two days if it were refused.

So why, in these days of computers and instant transfers, and when cheques no longer have to be presented at the drawing branch, why does it still take a week to clear?

The mechanical Proof machine was something to behold. You knew you'd arrived if you were judged sufficiently skilled to be able to operate it. You needed to be quick and accurate.

Speed and accuracy. Where have I heard that before?

As computers became smaller and more powerful and ways were found to speed up the input at branch level, these machines were phased out. Now the cheque is to be phased out.

And one day, cash will go as well.

School days.

Anyone lucky enough to have had a primary school education prior to 1970 had the best possible start in life. No calculators, no extra subjects to cram into the curriculum at the expense of the basics.
The teachers had time to teach you how to read. You proved that could read by standing up in class and reading from a book. They had time to teach you how to spell. Our fourth year teacher had spelling competitions that were fiercely fought. I recall as a ten year old standing up in class to spell "encyclopaedia". It was competitive. It was fun.
They taught us arithmetic. We had to learn our tables, up to the twelve times tables. By heart. My dad said I had it easy. There was even less pressure on the curriculum in the 1930s, so he had to learn up to the twenty times table. We were taught fractions. We were taught mental arithmetic. Calculators hadn't been invented.
My headmaster at Penpol Primary School in Hayle was a Mr Mitchell. He was a grown up so didn't have a first name. He taught the fifth year, and got us prepared for the eleven plus exam. Out of a class of about thirty, and without classroom assistants, he enabled five of us to pass the eleven plus and go the grammar school. Competition for places was tough. There were less than 200 places for the whole of West Cornwall. Selection was on merit, on how well you did in your exam. You got into grammar school because you were the best.
All through that final year at primary school his motto was "speed and accuracy". But accuracy first, because without accuracy, speed is useless.

I read recently that GCSE examiners are told to mark as correct any mathematics answer that has the right numbers but with the decimal point in the wrong place.
I also read recently about a locum doctor who prescribed ten times the dose of a drug to a patient who subsequently died.
And they don't make the connection.

Before February 1971, the currency in use consisted of pounds, shillings and pence. Twelve pence to the shilling, twenty shillings to the pound, two hundred and forty pennies to the pound.
When I started work at the bank, all staff were expected to be numerate, that is to say, they could add up and take away. Each cashier was responsible for the contents of his till, which he would balance each day. He/she had the use of a tally roll calculator for adding up the "meat ticket" cash slips, but we prided ourselves on our ability to do arithmetic, and to do as much as possible without recourse to machinery.

I left the bank in 1970 and for a few months worked as an invoice clerk for a frozen foods firm. The telesales girls would ring their customers and write the order on an itemised invoice. The Invoice clerks would price the individual lines, add up the invoice and deduct the commission to leave the total at the bottom. There were four of us, working to a deadline, and we'd have hundreds to tally up during the course of a day. We were employed on the basis of our ability to add up. And we were good.
Altogether now-
Take 3 3/4% discount off an invoice for £17-6-4d.

No I can't do it now either. But I could back then. Without recourse to paper and pencil.

Our branch of the bank was busy. We had several large local firms, plus many local shops and department stores. At the close of business, we'd have a pile of cheques a foot high that had to be sent away to the clearing house. Each morning we'd receive a huge pile of cheques that had to be filed into each customer's file. This was called sortaway. Then we'd compile the statements, taking the cheques and paying in slips and arranging them into the order they appeared on the statement. and woe betide if a cheque was mis-sorted. It had to be found.
By the time this was complete, there was a pile of today's work to be done. There was always a deadline to hit. It was pressure. It was fun. From 3.30 when the branch closed the doors until 5.00 it was a rush to balance the tills (to the penny), transfer the cash to the vaults, process all the paying in slips and cheques, punch the data, and bag up the cheques for clearing.
It was fun if you could keep up.
I couldn't.
I used to watch the more experienced staff as they operated the various machines. Their fingers flew over the keys and they never seemed to look at what they were doing. And their work was almost always correct to the penny.
I had to be taught how to do that. So they sent me away for a week to learn. It's a skill that never leaves you. In recent years I've worked from time to time in data entry. I easily passed every assessment, both for speed and for accuracy.
Speed and accuracy. But accuracy first.