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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
Yes, that’s right. I hadn’t thought about the notch for years. When we started out, they were single-density, as well as single-sided. Then, one day we had “double-density.” I can’t remember, if I ever knew, if that was an actual technological improvement producing a different sort of disk surface, if it had something to do with how the head formatted it, or if it was just another indicator of disk quality and the ability to store data reliably. I do remember that we were a bit dismissive of 5.25″ disks the first time we saw them, as if they were somehow fake, or toys.
When it came to “double-sided” disks, since the drives of the time could read from only one side, at first you had to eject them, turn them over, and stick them back in, to read the other side. (The infamous “flippy” disk.) Then at some point the drives became able to read from both sides of the disk, and that was no longer necessary.
The first word processors we used had one floppy disk. You loaded the OS, then took it out and put in the data disk on which you stored your document. Due to the limited internal memory (32K to start with, I think), you’d occasionally have to swap disks to put the OS disk back in–say you wanted to run a spelling check, and the “spell check” piece of the program wasn’t in RAM (not enough room). So you’d do the old swaperoo after picking “check spelling” and following the instructions to swap disks, to get the spell check part of the code loaded. Then put the data disk in, and off you went. The next models had two floppy drives, so the OS could stay in place, although the swapping and grinding as what the company called “overlay technology” (swapping code into and out of memory) continued.
The programming was a marvel of efficiency and functionality. Aside from the graphics and the WYSIWYG, there’s not much that Microsoft Word can do today that an NBI System 3000 Level C and above couldn’t do in about 1984.
Different world.
As someone who made the mistake of working for a very busy lawyer one summer, a lawyer who only wanted me there 3 weekends in June to do some accounting stuff he needed by July, I ended up on the short end of the stick.
I was on unemployment in Calif. To get any benefits & to keep my unemployment account open, I had to report the weekends I worked and salary. So each of those weeks, I made my reports. I made too much those 3 weekends to get my bennies, but it kept my account open.
In October I received a notice I was to go in and speak to the # 1 person at the unemployment department. I knew nothing about her, but knew reporting to her was not good.
Apparently the busy lawyer had never bothered to report he had me work for him in June. Instead he reported I had worked for him in August.
I protested this was not true. I felt lucky, as I had my little memo book on me. I could easily point to hand written notes about hours & weekends worked in June. It was clear to see the info was legit as my entries were buried in my notations prior to entries made in August.
This woman dismissed me with agitation. Surely this was the end of it. A week later I received a call that since the lawyer had his report done by computer, and mine was only in handwriting, I’d be charged forthwith for falsifying my Aug unemployment reports.
Her attitude was the attorney reported my working in Aug. Since I never mentioned working for him in Aug in my reports, I was now a criminal. This woman would be reporting later in the day to the state of my fraud against the state-run system. Penalty could be significant in terms of $$ and it could entail a 16 year prison sentience.
After dropping the kid off at school, I stood beside my car & cried. My neighbor saw me there & asked “What’s up?” I explained the whole sorry tale.
She then stated this woman heading the unemployment division was the granddaughter of some San Francisco Mafiosa boss. She said that she’d gone through a similar thing with her a year before.
“Wrack your brain about this. Is there anyone else who could be offered as a witness to your situation?”
Suddenly it dawned on me that the 1st weekend I had worked there I had gone there through an employment agency. They had called me before I went in the 2nd weekend to say he was a difficult guy. I could either decide to continue working for him or quit. But if I worked with him, I would be an indie contractor.
I phoned that agency’s owner and she called up the unemployment division. But to this day, if I have to submit any reports regarding anything, it is always on a computer-generated report system.
####
There were lots of places advertising in magazines etc for the tools to notch 5.25″ floppies to appear double-sided, and places advertising double-sided disks that had been so notched, judging from the prices they were using. For 5.25″ it might have actually been a hole, not a notch on the side. I have 5.25″ disks, some brand new, that I still use for my Atari computers and others, including a mint-condition Otrona Attaché. I got that just a few years ago, but the Otronas were one of the models used by people in the field working with the building-energy-audit software I worked on. Others used Compaq Portables (these were all really “luggable” not really “portable” since they had no battery to run from) which had the advantage of a larger screen, and after a while started being offered with internal hard drive.
Funny side note: the software took a while to load, so I had programmed in a bit to play the “Kentucky Derby” song “in background” (that way it didn’t slow down the loading process) while that was going on. As it worked out, the software finished loading and was ready to use, just as the tune ended. As I recall, management commented that bit out, but then some of the customers heard about it and they wanted it!
Otrona Attaché:
That was a kludge too, and introduced another problem: by flipping the disk, the internal part would rotate the opposite direction. Which meant that dust which had previously been collected by the material inside the jacket, could get… re-introduced… to the heads. Many problems came from that kludge.
I heard a story that was somewhat the opposite, though it involved the IRS rather than an unemployment division. The guy had a small, one-person business, and he kept his records in a small notebook that he carried in his overalls. At an audit when the IRS guy challenged him about documentation for some of his expenses (or whatever) he took the greasy notebook out of his pocket and pushed it across the desk. The IRS guy didn’t want to touch it; he poked at it with a pen and said, “I guess you do have records.”
I heard this in a small-business class I took at the local community college in the late 80s; I don’t know when it actually happened
I probably should have mentioned that the Otrona Attaché normally ran CP/M but there was an “expanded” version with an extra circuit board that could run PC-DOS, although it was a variant of 2.mumble and I don’t think they ever came out with a higher version. The software I developed was for PC-DOS and so if one of their customers wanted to use Otronas they had to get the “expanded” model. Most of them seemed to go with the Compaq Portable because the larger screen made them a lot easier to use.
I did a lot of development work on CP/M and Digital Research’s compiled C-BASIC. I preferred CP/M to MSDOS. The universe chose differently.
Basic CP/M was very limited. MP/M did a better job. At some point it became pretty clear, especially when hard drives entered the scene, that people would need folders and sub-folders etc, something that CP/M didn’t get to as least in the versions I saw.
Lord. VisiCalc. SuperCalc. MultiPlan. The older I get, and the longer I think about this, the more welcome, and not so welcome, thoughts and terms come to mind. I still use the old Lotus 1-2-3 shortcuts, even in Excel.
The IRS has rules that state that a business owner must keep records on his business expenses etc. They are pretty loosey goosey about how the records are kept. In fact, a much used, greasy book of records might look more authentic to some agents than a crisp computer read out.
Conventional common sense can help a person deal with the IRS. Avoiding common ssense can have serious repercussions.
For instance, a guy was down on his luck one year, and really needed major money fast. A friend reminded him he hadn’t done his taxes yet. Didn’t he always get a refund?
So the guy got out his 1040 and Sched C, and then became a bit more ambitious about his business expenses. He managed to jack up his refund amount so it was close to 26,000 bucks. Sure enough, ten weeks later he got his refund check. No questions had been asked.
All would have been okay except he decided to get an even bigger piece of the pie the following tax season. He once again jimmied around his numbers.
This time he got no refund. Instead he got an orange jump suit.
Why? Because he had asked for 23 trillions of dollars, or about 7 trillion more than the nation’s entire GDP for the previous year.
(Don’t know if this is an urban legend, but I have always enjoyed the story.)
Another little odd thing: Since the CP/M disk format for the Otrona Attaché is different, you’d normally get CP/M disks from Otrona (which no longer exists) or some other CP/M source (which also mostly no longer exist). But I happened to locate someone in Belgium who had them, and sent them to me. With one usable copy, I can format more disks and make backups, etc.
The PC-DOS 2.mumble was also “special” as mentioned before. But I was able to find an old-PC archiving program capable of reading and writing a lot of different 5.25″ formats, plus an online archive of the PC-DOS 2.mumble that the old-PC archiving program recognized. So I have the program, and the DOS 2.mumble archive, and a 486-66 system running DOS to do it all on, I just haven’t gotten to it yet. Someday…
LOL, I love that you were able to create a post about voter fraud, that slipped by our superiors and was promoted to the Main feed. You are deliciously, brilliantly devious.
That’s how the good Russian movies were made during the late Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras — the Golden Age of Russian film. Some filmmakers were similarly devious.
I didn’t realize it was a verboten subject. That’s pretty shocking if true.
It isn’t. There is one voting fraud piece currently on the first page of the Main Feed, Voting In Shenanigan County, USA by Doug Watt. There’s another recently promoted piece about electoral reform in the U.S., How to Improve US Elections, from a Northern Friend by SPare. And iWe’s Broken Systems touches on the topic of untrustworthy machines.
Having said that, there are a couple of notable posts on the Member Feed that, I think, should be promoted:
Evidence That Demands A Verdict: Then and Now, by Vince Guerra, is quite good. It was posted today and has 34 “likes.” I think it deserves promotion.
And the helpful index of Election Fraud Allegations by namlliT noD has been online for two days and has 31 “likes.”