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When Computers Rule
“I wanted to kill myself. If I hadn’t been pregnant, I definitely would have killed myself.” Thus, does Seema Misra begin the story of her three-year odyssey as a sub-postmistress working for Britain’s Royal Mail.
She was approved to open a postal station in her small Surrey shop in 2005, and was set up with supplies and a Horizon computer terminal to use for Post Office business. (A word to the wise: the Post Office in the UK operates differently than it does in the States, and there are over 11,000 of these “sub-post offices,” usually operating out of small general stores, chemist shops, or newsagents, dotted all over the country, often in out-of-the-way villages (think Agatha Christie mysteries) which would otherwise be underserved. The people who run them are contractors, not employees of the Royal Mail. And the post office itself is used for purposes unheard of in the US–you can go there to pay your utility bill, perform banking transactions, and get your welfare payments, as well as buy stamps and send off letters and packages.)
It wasn’t long before Seema began to notice discrepancies in her end-of-day reconciliations, between what she thought should have been the total Post Office business done, and what the computer report spat out. In every case, the computer report indicated that there should have been more money applied to the account than indicated when Seema took the receipts and transaction history and totaled them up manually. Some days, the discrepancies were in the £100 range. Sometimes, thousands.
She reported this as a problem both to Horizon (Fujitsu) and to her supervisors at the Post Office. They advised her that she was liable for the discrepancies because she’d signed a contract promising to make good any losses. So she began feeding profits from her store into the Royal Mail system to make up the difference and balance the Post Office account. She kept reporting the problem. They kept insisting the trouble was with her.
She was suspended from her job with the Royal Mail in January of 2008, when an audit found a discrepancy of £74,000 in her accounts (about $100K in today’s money).
And after a court summons and a guilty verdict, Seema Misra was sent to jail where she spent months in the company of the dregs of society. While she was on the inside, her husband was repeatedly beaten up by neighbors who called his wife a thief. The family lost their home, and her record as a felon made it difficult for them to rent, and subsequently for her to get another job.
This year, for the first time, and as the result of an October 2020 statement by the Royal Mail that it will “not contest” the efforts of people such as Seema to get their convictions overturned (“Bally decent of the old chaps,” I can just about hear Bertie Wooster saying), there is hope for Seema and her family.
There are over 1,000 people like Seema Misra in the United Kingdom, victims of what some have called “the worst miscarriage of justice in the legal system in modern British history.” It’s an unbelievable horror of a tale, and I won’t belabor it (there are a number of links at the bottom of this post, if you’d like to read more), but in a nutshell, the facts are these:
- In 1995, the Royal Mail instituted a pilot program at several offices involving a computerized “smartcard” system to automate the payout of welfare benefits to prospective recipients and reduce fraud (LOL).
- The rollout failed (imagine my surprise) and the project was scrapped after an expenditure of about three-quarters of a billion pounds, but from its ashes arose something called “Horizon,” a point-of-sale (POS–LOL again) system for Royal Mail transactions.
- Problems with balancing and reconciliation were quickly noted and publicized.
- The IT vendor (Fujitsu) and the Post Office repeatedly insisted that each case was unique, that “no-one else” was reporting similar problems (this was false and they must have known this at the time), and did nothing to help its contracted employees.
- The Post Office failed to find a problem with the software, commissioned an audit, canceled the audit a day before it was due to be published, and concluded that there was no systemic problem with the Horizon system.
- Between 2009 and 2013, the Post Office began to admit that, yes, there were bugs in the system, but that the system was “working as designed” and was fit for purpose. It strenuously denied reports by sub-postmasters and postmistresses that it appeared as if transactions were being altered “after the fact” by Fujitsu technical support, and insisted that such things simply weren’t possible.
- Investigative audits began to track errors in the software, including the fact that it wasn’t tracking certain transactions, was recording some transactions in duplicate, and was disadvantaged in some cases by old or inadequate equipment. The Post Office dismissed most of these claims, insisted that the problem was inadequate training, and that, instead, the bulk of the problem lay with the sub-postmasters and postmistresses who were, in a word, thieves.
- At some point, the audits and investigation concluded that it was, despite the Royal Mail’s insistence to the contrary, entirely possible that employees at Horizon/Fujitsu could have intervened and changed the data unbeknownst to the postmasters/mistresses, and that, in fact, they likely had.
- An organization, Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance, got things somewhat organized, and secured backing to reduce the fear (which many of the individuals had) that they couldn’t possibly contest the charges because if they did they’d, by law, be required to pay the Post Office court costs. This may have been the moment when the tide began to turn.
Meanwhile, The Royal Mail launched an aggressive campaign against people reporting the discrepancies and difficulty balancing, and over the course of several years, hundreds were sent to jail. Hundreds were disgraced. Many were placed on suicide watch. At least one committed the act. Hundreds of singles and couples who’d taken on the Royal Mail commission as a fillip for their retirement income were embarrassed, humiliated, shamed, and disgraced. In many cases, they were jailed and permanently branded “thieves.”
In December of 2019, in a blistering 400-page ruling, a judge ruled that “bugs, errors and defects in the Horizon system was the cause of the discrepancies which had ruined hundreds of people.” (550 of them were part of the class-action lawsuit which led to this ruling.) He also opened the door to the idea that the software defects should allow the defendants/convicted felons the right to petition to have their guilty verdicts overturned.
And that is what has led to the Royal Mail’s generous decision that it will “not contest” the efforts of people like Seema Misra to get their lives back after more than a decade in Hell. Jolly big of them. (Each “convict” has to petition individually, and have the case heard and the verdict rendered.)
Meanwhile, there’s a £58 million class-action settlement which, by the time all the fees are paid, means that participants in the suit will receive a pittance for their victimization, bullying, and terrorization by the all-powerful State.
It’s an absolutely sickening story. And now, for the rest of it. Warning–Strong opinions follow:
Almost nothing fills the heart of the person in IT-world with dread so much as the thought of being on the receiving end of a barrage of criticism from hundreds, maybe even thousands, of the great unwashed in Realville, complaining or explaining why the marvelous and perfect system he envisioned, coded, tested, and filled with the bells and whistles of his dreams, isn’t satisfactory and may even–quelle horreur, c’est impossible!–have a few defects. Not only is there the obvious ego problem, there’s often a language problem as well, as the computer-illiterate (not in any way intended as a slur) struggle to communicate with someone speaking from the rarefied heights of Technology Privilege.
It’s not dissimilar to, and I think the chasm is about as wide, the language difference between the sexes. I am sometimes reminded (as I often seem to be) of an old Punch cartoon from the late 1950s or early 1960s. (Probably the latter, since I must have been old enough to appreciate it and remember it.) A well-dressed lady–think Maggie Thatcher, or Margo Leadbetter (for fans of the old BBC series “Good Neighbors“)–is trying to explain to the garage mechanic, in as much detail as she can, exactly what’s wrong under the ‘bonnet’ of her vehicle. He’s standing there in his filthy overalls, scratching his…umm…belly and rolling his eyes, and probably imagining what fun he’s going to have telling this story to his mates at the pub, and she’s saying, I’m sure in a very Received Pronunciation sort of way: “It sounds like hairpins rattling around inside a plastic cup.”
The first response of our hero in IT-world (I was one, so absolute moral authority, and yes I’m exaggerating a bit for effect. But those of you who’ve lived the dream, tell me if I’m not right over the target) to such a presentation, and to an often inelegant and inaccurate attempt to describe the problem, is to try to get rid of these people as quickly as possible so he can get back to WoW or whatever was occupying his time prior to the nuisance call, and so she can get back to her knitting. There are a few tried and tested responses to help this along:
- “Is that so? I’ve never heard of that before.”
- “I can’t replicate your problem.”
- “You must be doing it wrong.”
- “No one else is reporting your problem.”
- “Who told you to do that?”
And finally, the big guns:
- “You must be mistaken. That’s just not possible. The computer isn’t wrong.”
Case closed. One of, or a collection of, these responses will probably get rid of more than half of the first-time callers who slink back to their desks in shame and promise themselves never to try something like that again.
If the person in Realville is persistent, isn’t intimidated into silence and a sense that she must have screwed up somehow, and if she really believes there’s something wrong (and not with her), where does she go next? To her supervisor, of course! Except that he’s probably not much of a computer person either, and there’s nothing he wants to hear less than that the system he and his company recommended and spent upwards of £1 billion to purchase, and years to implement, isn’t doing the job and may actually be distorting and corrupting the books. A moment’s thought, and it will occur to our doughty corporate warrior that calling the complainant a liar or a thief, and ordering her to make up the difference from her own pocketbook will probably shut her up, and if it doesn’t, at least it will move the problem out of his jurisdiction and into someone else’s.
And so they did.
Full disclosure: I knew nothing of this story until last week, when my sister and I were discussing the daily sausage-factory of new reports over possible election malfeasance in the United States. I remarked that “nothing would surprise me anymore.” And I also (full disclosure again) said that as a person of IT privilege (as both I and my sister are), I couldn’t imagine anything more difficult than trying to sort out the sheep from the goats (something else I have some experience with) when it came to the facts of the matter as explained by hundreds, if not thousands of folks who don’t share our obsession with binary and logical exactitude, and who were trying to describe their interaction with voting machines. She asked me if I’d heard about the Royal Mail story. I had not. But now I have.
And so have you.
Crimenutely, folks. I’m a firm believer in Hanlon’s razor. But, whether it’s malice or incompetence, it deserves to be looked at. And sometimes the inarticulate little people who are at the point of the spear have more real information than we do. This is a lesson I learned early on in my illustrious (LOL) IT career. It stood me in good stead, and I don’t think it ever, ever let me down.
Let’s hope that the truth, whatever it is (and I don’t know what the truth is–and, to be clear, neither do you) doesn’t take 15 years to come out because some of us are too cowardly, too invested in the status quo, or just too lazy, to engage with it.
Computers can, indeed, be wrong. We can talk more about whose fault that is, some other time.
Further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_(IT_system)
https://www.ft.com/content/0138cd7d-9673-436b-86a1-33704b29eb60
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-50747143
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-23233573
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52905378
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-54384427
https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/spending-nears-40m-in-mammoth-post-office-case/5101919.article
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/fraud-case-costs-post-office-58m-h2xb67lgr
Published in General
Your calculations for finding the difference between two dates must be fun.
I do it in Prolog. So, you know. Practically writes itself.
Indeed. I could just about do it myself. You don’t want to stress my skills in that area much beyond that, trust me. Not my strength.
In any situation where such a thing is called into question, and just as with the Royal Mail’s Horizon system, I’d rather reserve my suspicion and contempt for the people who failed to test properly, failed to oversee properly, and then manipulated, lied and covered up after the fact. Those are the people who ruined Seema Misra’s life, and the lives of hundreds of others. Not so much the guy writing the code, whether or not it was faulty.
Standard behavior of a printf(“%02d”, x) in C will yield zero padded two digits for 0 <= x <= 99, and expand as needed for larger numbers. The width specifier in that format is a minimum length. Other languages are similar.
Phil, I think the challenge Percival was addressing was how to get 100, rather than 0, in the computation. If the input date had simply been masked to two digits, so that 1900 and 2000 both looked like zero, or if (date % 100) had been used, then 2000 would become 0, and not 100. Anyway, that’s how I read it. (And I read your comment as (date – 1900), which also yields 100 and so works just as well in his explanation.)
Of course, I just write 2000 as MM.
I think you misunderstand my point. I don’t think there was masking or modulus in the original code. Just print the integer after a static string “19”, with actual storage of years as that integer (88 stored for 1988, etc). That’s the kind of code that was widespread prior to y2k, and the kind of code I spent time fixing for my then-employer in the panic leading to y2k. That kind of breakage would have given precisely the printout Percy experienced.
Probably deliberately.
Look. This is about Trump, isn’t it. You’re just pretending it’s about encoding dates in software.
What does the former Redskins quarterback have to do with anything?
Ok, that really did make me laugh out loud. (:
All this talk about date codes:
Our accounting system is ancient – 1990s and DOS based. Was patched to make it Y2K compliant, but barely. I’ve been trying to get us off it for years, but my father refused to budge. Should have gotten off it this year, but COVID and other disasters made that difficult.
Anyway, to do anything useful with its data, beyond paying bills, collecting money, and issuing POs and invoices, I have to shift everything into Excel. Unfortunately this old system exports date codes as MMDDYYYY, and it strips out leading zeroes in the first 9 months. So do actually make this damned thing work I have to recode the date fields doing IF statements to check for length, then use various RIGHT, LEFT, and MID functions to pluck the month, day, and year fields, then CONCATENATE them back into a form that I can then properly manipulate and use to do anything. It’s a bloody PIA.
Excel is absurd at handling input and output date formats.
That’s some old BASIC, Skip. And still DOS based? MS-BASIC?
What would possess someone to come up with something like that? Especially without delimiters such as / or -. Why strip a leading zero from the month if it can’t be done for the day? Makes me wonder if the whole thing isn’t really stored as some kind of integer that’s just handled differently in some areas. That could explain both not having the leading zero for the month, but having it for the day. Because a date like 4152020 would be handled internally as 4 million, 152 thousand, and 20.
I’m not sure the code base, but it’s not BASIC.
And I can run it still in Win7-32bit, but even there I’m running Win7 in VMWare to keep it isolated and relatively sandboxed.
The whole date data is an integer, which is way the days are safely nestled betwixt the months and years, and so not pwned.
I don’t understand why this is, but it’s hellishly stupid.
What do you guys talk about at parties?
Star Trek.
Whether we abandoned vacuum tubes in too much haste.
That’s perfect. I’ll be there at nine.
One of my contract/consulting jobs in the mid-80s was creating building-energy-audit software for commercial buildings (part of a government mandate at that time), one of the main clients was Southern California Edison. It was in compiled BASIC, at that time I think running on MS-DOS or PC-DOS 2.mumble. (For that job I got the first IBM XT in the Pacific Northwest through Sears Business Center that actually had the hard drive in the main system unit: Before that the “IBM XT” was a separate box with power supply and ONLY the hard drive, which connected to the main PC unit through a thick data cable.) I don’t remember exactly how it handled date fields, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they were essentially stored as integers as mentioned in my previous comment. Doing it that way would require only a few bytes per item. It’s kinda like how DEC’s DIBOL language represented all numbers including “dollars and cents” as whole numbers/integers internally, decimals were just added for display output/printing. But it took less space that way, and avoided floating point errors.
Maybe because space was still relatively premium then, and a date stored as an integer takes maybe, what, 3 bytes? Versus 8 as characters.
At that time I wrote my stuff, 1.44 megabyte floppies hadn’t yet come out. 360k was pretty standard for 5.25″ floppies.
To use Star Trek again:
“Parties? Your words… say nothing.”
Hey I’ve got a real nice 1990s or so Luxman CD player with vacuum tubes in the output section. It sounds wonderful! And Luxman still makes vacuum tube amplifiers, if you can afford them.
Well, two or four. You’d need four (a 32-bit “long integer”) to store a whole date. The earliest DOS BASICs stored dates as strings, if I remember correctly; QBasic had no date data type.
Hm, well 24-bits unsigned can go up to 16,777,215. But that could be “compressed” a bit (ar ar, Earth humor!) since the day never goes over 31. It would be a shame to add another whole byte just to have an uncompressed integer date.
Or did maybe DOS and some associated languages back then, use “Date” fields as “number of days since XX/YY/ZZZZ?” That might be possible too.
An online calculator tells me that 16,777,215 days from 1/1/1970 would be 6/16/47904. That’s a pretty good lifespan for any software package.
I love it when men talk dirty.
Pffft! In my early days, the floppies were single-sided 8″ and stored about 80K. The first “server” I ever supported had a 2MB hard disk drive, could have up to eight workstations attached, and was capable of storing about 800 pages of documents. We thought we’d died and gone to heaven, and that we’d never run out of space. Although, of course, backups had to be done to those 8″ floppies. Output was to a laser printer about the size of a washing machine which, IIRC had 128K of internal memory (might have been less; certainly wasn’t more. There were no graphics. You could also attach an optical character reader (also about the size of a washing machine) that took typed pages (which had to be typed using a special typewriter font) and scanned and digitized them and stored them on the hard drive.
PC-BASIC loaded from a tape drive to an IBM 5100 was my first experience in, I suppose, about 1978. (When the first IBM PCs were released in 1981, they were model “5150” in the same series.) The kids and I learned how to “program” by typing in Hunt the Wumpus and then figuring out how to change the messages, and the number of “rooms” and the directional instructions. We had so much fun it led to the purchase of an ATARI 400 and much fun with Atari BASIC (I gave away decades’ worth of COMPUTE! and Antic magazines just a couple of months ago). Along the way, we increased the memory, added numerous peripherals, including a disc drive, and I wired in a “real” keyboard to replace the chiclet one that came with. Good memories all.
I still have all the goods, but haven’t fired them up for a few years. The last time, I did get it working on the 47″ flat screen, as I amused myself with Pooyan, Shooting Gallery, Apple Panic, and a few of my favorites. Also (I used to be whatever it was that passed for a game geek in the early 1980s), bootlegged development copies of Rescue on Fractalus and BallBlaster (which was renamed BallBlazer when it was released because, I suppose, squirmy name. They were the first two products of a fledgling company called LucasFilm Games, which several years later became LucasArts.
A few days ago, on another trip down memory lane, I downloaded the first three Kings Quest games (mid 1980s). Didn’t get very far through the first one before (the text message informed me when I disappeared silently and precipitously from the screen) that I “fell into the moat and ha[d] been eaten by hungry alligators.”
I miss those days.
PS: Excel time/date formats are a horror show in their own right.
I bought an Atari 400, quickly upgraded to 800 with real keyboard.
I started in 1973 on a PDP-8/L with Teletype and paper tape. And entering some programs – and starting to load from paper tape – using switches.
Yes. I wrote a small custom tariff-tracking application for a trucking company in the summer of 1980, on an IBM 5100 microcomputer. Low, wide desktop unit, heavy, little tiny block-mode screen (you typed on it and then hit the enter key to send the entire screen’s contents). Pretty nice built-in BASIC. A lot of diskette changes. But it supported index file access, which was pretty sweet.
Incidentally, speaking of 8″ floppy disks. This was back in the day when 8″ disks were either double-sided or single-sided. As I remember it, a disk was manufactured to be double-sided but, if it failed the surface tests, it was put into a notched envelope to communicate that it was single-sided. That same little trucking company for which I wrote the tariff system had a few cases of single-sided 8″ disks. It was a pretty shiftless outfit (though, to their credit, they paid me for the work I did). I got a call one day from Leon, a fellow who worked there, asking me if they could simply put a sticker over the notch on the envelope and sell the disks as double-sided — and turn a little profit. I explained that he could do that, but that the disks would fail and, furthermore, that it would be fraud. I don’t know if they ever went ahead with it. As I said, they were pretty shifty.