on Post Office Counters and Horizon, part 2
Since last week I have been doing a bit of digging into the history, and, to some extend, I have answered a few of the questions that were bothering me, but I have also exposed new ones. I doubt that I will ever get to the bottom of it all, but it has passed a few hours of my week.
Something that is bothering me is the lynch mob mentality that is running rampant. Yes, the former CEO has questions to answer. This happened on her watch and she has to accept responsibility, but what did she know? The short answer is what she was told. Some people are guilty of something here, but what exactly? Fraud, theft, perverting the course of justice? I don’t know.
What I do know is that this needs to be properly investigated. The public enquiry has achieved little other than to line the pockets of lawyers, and others. We need a proper investigation, not another lynching. The problem will be in trying to get to the bottom of it all, and in sorting out between those whose job performance was not up to scratch and those who may be guilty of some crime.
on Post Office Counters and Horizon
I have an interest in this story, in that I was a Post Office counter clerk in 1977/78, working at the Crown Offices, ie; Post Office owned and operated rather than sub-offices, at Chelmsford, Witham, Dunmow, Ontario, Brentwood and Ingatestone, all in Essex. Then in 1978/79 I worked at Chelmsford Head Post Office sending out cash and value stock (stamps, premium bonds etc) to the sub-postoffices in the Chelmsford Head Post Office area.
In 1982 I joined the team who trialled automation systems in Crown and sub-office sites around the country, a project that proved the business case for what later became Horizon. That project ended in 1984, as far as my involvement was concerned and I had no further involvement with the sub-offices until 1989 when I became Head of Operations at Post Office Supplies, where one of my teams managed the supply of forms and stationery to the Post Office in general, including the sub-office network.
So there are my credentials, for want of a better word, for commenting on this scandal. I have no working knowledge of Horizon having only ever encountered it as a customer in post offices, but I do know about balancing a Post Office till, designing, writing and testing software to run a Post Office till. I know about running said software and and developing it, so I have been intrigued by the Horizon scandal as it has developed, and there are various things that concern me.
Balancing a till is a matter of the value stock and cash that you started the accounting period with against where you are now, taking into account what business you have transacted in between. In my day it was all manual, and if you were over or under then you had probably counted something incorrectly, and a re-count would usually find the error. There was always the chance that you had paid out someone more than you should have (if you underpaid them they would normally let you know) or failed to charge the correct amount, but such circumstances were very rare in my experience. A big over/under was the easiest thing to find because there were fewer places to look for it: It was the £2.67, or similar discrepancy that was difficult because it could be anywhere and you had to do the whole lot again. Sod’s Law decreed that it would be almost the last thing that you checked that would reveal the error.
Working with the automated systems that we trialed you still counted your cash and value stock, but now the system told you what should be there. The systems made life easier, and from a business point of view, more efficient in that hundredweights (literally) of paperwork could be dispensed with. Balancing your till, certainly in the two offices that I was involved in supporting, became easier.
As I understand the Horizon issues the losses were in four figures or worse. Some of the losses that I have seen would have been the best part of a day’s worth of pension or family allowance payments, so how on earth could they be right? There were always the odd rogue amongst the Post Office employed clerks and the sub-office ranks, but I know how that sort of theft works, and how it is discovered. None of the cases involving Horizon that I have read about fit the pattern. No, I do not have all of the facts, but I smell a rat here.
It is possible that there is a glitch in the software, maybe more than one, but I am not convinced. It would have to be a very poor system and I doubt that. In any case, the laws of chance require that the odds of an error would go either way and there have been no reports of mysterious overs, only losses. I’ll speculate no further on that.
There have long been rumours within the business that it was possible for the centre to make amendments to local details. Now that was always a possible system requirement, but when we looked at it back in 82-4 it would only have been possible with an audit trail and there had to be evidence of what had been done available at both ends and an audit report on such transactions was available. What was happening with Horizon I don’t know.
For me it is obvious that there was something wrong. I know how thorough The Post Office investigations were for many things, I was often one of those investigating wrong doing of all sorts, and, having found something wrong on my patch, had to pass it on to others to investigate. It seems to me that none of these Horizon cases were properly investigated, and that the mounting evidence of a problem was ignored.
Until I moved on to other things in 1996 I would have been sure that the senior management in Post Office Counters would not have allowed this scandal to develop, but the people that I knew well and worked with up until then all moved on or had retired by the end of that decade. I am not aware of knowing anyone involved in Horizon, although there may be a name or two emerge that rings a bell. I would love to be able to talk to someone on the inside to get an understanding of what happened and how. The Berkshire Belle, my wife of more than thirty years now, is also very distressed by the scandal because she knew the sub-office network better than I did. She worked to support it in various capacities as she climbed through the ranks over fifteen or so years and attended their conference every year from the late 70’s to 1989 (when we went to the Scarborough one together). If any of you out there remember Fay from Swindon, then that is she. Feel free to say hello via this site if you’d like to.
There is a group of people who knowingly allowed this scandal to develop. They have caused pain and suffering to people and should be held to account for it. It is a national disgrace.
on managing, yesterday and today
It is 52 years since I took my first step into management. It was just a small step, I ran an estate agency’s branch office where the only employees were me and a part time typist. I learned about responsibility, but nothing of any significance over the eight or nine months that I was in that job as far as managing people was concerned.
My next outing as a manager was about two years later when, for two weeks, I covered for someone who was on holiday. I knew the job that I had to do, but my team was two pairs of middle aged women, one pair in the mornings and the other in the afternoons. I was clueless in directing them and they ran rings around me. I made such a hash of it that it almost stopped my career progression with that company on its tracks.
I started to watch other managers and began to understand a little. As always there were good managers and bad, but I started to see why and I was on the cusp of being given my own department to run when I upped sticks and left. It was a stupid move and six months later I moved again. In this, latest, job I restarted progress towards becoming a manager.
It took me twelve years from starting work before I finally got into the managerial ranks but, once there, I made rapid progress and had a good run, making it from the shop floor to the boardroom. We had processes, rules and laws to comply with, but decision making and leading your people were fundamental parts of what we did. If you were good enough at those you did well.
Today’s managers seem to lack almost all of the freedom that we enjoyed. Computers don’t guide the modern manager in the way that they began to do for me, now they make many of the decisions; scheduling hours, ordering stock and more. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is taking over and I am aware of systems that drive many of the things that a manager would have been expected to get right.
I wonder what skills I would be looking for if I were asked to assess someone for a management role today. Leadership would be a given, but what else if the machine is making all of the decisions? Almost none of the managerial skills that I might have looked for in terms of being able to assimilate, assess and react to information seem to be applicable in the modern environment. There is one though, and it is ever more applicable in today’s environment, and it is the ability to create a workplace that the team feel comfortable, safe and valued in.
This is not so much in the physical sense, because that should be a given, rather it is in the psychological arena, and the key to it is being able to act as a barrier between the company and your team. Let the good stuff flow through, anything positive, involving praise or general corporate information, but as a wall against anything negative. You may be getting hammered by your boss over some element of performance, but the way that you handle that with your team is important.
The ability to lead people is going to outlive anything that AI can do, and a good leader will still stand out, especially the ones that can create an environment where their team can learn, make mistakes and grow. Such places are happy ones, despite any day to day frustrations that life throws up. Creating them is a skill that we need to cherish.
life log #15
My recent stay in hospital has had a profound effect on me, the Berkshire Belle and thus my life. It is something that I am only just beginning to recognise, and therefore I have not yet fully understood it and cannot, as yet, come to terms with.
I had not realised until a couple of weeks after I came out of hospital the full picture of how ill I had been. I had not inkling of the conversation that the Hastings Hottie had had with the cardiologist on the first Thursday of my stay in hospital, and how she had gone home that evening with a real expectation that the ‘phone call would come to say that I had gone.
As an ex-nurse she is in that difficult position of knowing too much and not enough at the same time, and recognised that, despite the platitudes, I was close to the end and that the medical team were running out of options. Fortunately, on the next day, Friday, they worked out where the problem was and scheduled me for theatre.
My memories of that first week are sketchy. I can remember lying on the floor and thinking how nice the carpet was, then I have a memory of a lady paramedic talking to me, but I was floating in and out of consciousness. I can recall being taken back into the ambulance and then being in a bed in a corridor, and then being taken for some test or other, of having lost my parking space in the corridor on return in A&E and having to be found another space there. I can remember ringing the BB and telling her that I was in Bay 16 and then of being taken up onto Amply Ward where a bed was available.
Most of what I remember of that first week is pleasant. The ward was just around the corner from where I had stayed for the bulk of my last stay eleven years ago and so I could see the helicopter come into land and, in the distance, some of the same countryside. There are some unpleasant memories; one nurse who had trouble finding a vein to take blood from being brutal with the tourniquet and leaving me with a bruise that has only just faded, and having to wear incontinence pants. I am not sure if I was sedated or not at that point, but it could explain why I was, as the Wonder of Wokingham puts it, not really with it a lot of the time.
This is me at 0700 on Saturday the 16th June, ten or so hours after coming back from surgery. I am not sure who took the photo, I don’t think that I did.
And this is me at 1045 the next day, Sunday 18th June. I am feeling pretty good and have made the effort to put a decent shirt on. At that point we hadn’t got my electric razor sorted and so I am unshaven. I am on the Critical Care ward with my own room and a nurse stationed outside where she can see me through the window by the door. There is a visible transformation.
In the Critical Care ward I may well have been sedated. Certainly I was confined to be from the time that I arrived there on Friday evening until around the middle of the following week when, having asked if I could have a shower instead of the daily blanket baths, I was assisted to the shower by a nurse who washed and dried me as I sat in a plastic chair.
I had no strength in my legs and, on the Thursday of that week two Physio ladies turned up to see me and to get me out of bed. I quickly came to loathe them as they got me doing things that I really did not enjoy. Walking with a Zimmer frame was just about bearable, but standing on one leg was not, and nor were any other of the exercise that they put me through. I christened them Bambi and Thumper after two characters in Diamonds are Forever who give James Bond a working over.
They came twice on the Thursday and then again on the Friday morning. Friday afternoon Bambi turned up with a male colleague and they took me out for a walk in the ward using a walking stick and, presumably liking what they saw, asked if I would try some stairs. Whilst walking on the level was an issue, the stairs were a breeze and I flew up two flights with no problem and came back down equally confident. My torturers were satisfied that I could walk and my days in critical care were numbered; the next day I was moved out.
Back on an ordinary ward I quickly weaned myself off the incontinence pants and began to walk up and down the ward’s corridors. I needed my walking stick, but the main aim was to be seen to be making an effort as I wanted to be sent home.
I was on a schedule of drugs, in tablet, injection and drip-feed forms, these being served up around the clock, and I was also still having my blood pressure and sugar levels checked at regular intervals. My room on the ward was one of the standard five bed type and I was, this time, in the bed next to the bathroom. One of the problems with being in this sort of situation is the risk of becoming institutionalised, and I tried to resist that, but things like mealtimes can assume a level of importance, that need for a routine is very pervasive, especially as I enjoyed the food.
My efforts to avoid sinking into the mire were in my walking, and that gave me an escape, even if only for a few moments. The Berkshire Belle persuaded my that she and I should go down to the Costa Coffee bar in the hospital’s reception area and we did that a couple of times during my last week and I also went down there after breakfast on my last two days.
I was released two weeks earlier than planned, primarily because I had shown that I could get about unaided, and had intended to go back to work a couple of weeks later, but my GP signed me off for longer on the basis that I needed the time to recover. He was right, although I was disappointed, but the reality is that I am struggling with my physical fitness. A combination of Sciatica and Plantar fasciitis makes walking difficult and I need to be able to walk around six miles in a four hour session when I go back to work.
So my first change is physical, in that I walk like an old man for the first time, age looks to have caught up with me. The other change is really mental in that I have been off work for two months now, the longest I have been off work in my adult life. I desperately need to get back into the saddle to sort my mind out, but am not fully confident that my body will take it, which is another mental issue.
Time will tell, and I hope that the next life log will tell of everything being fine.
nice guys don’t come first
I ran into an old colleague last week, not someone that I had worked very closely with, but our paths had crossed a lot over a dozen years or so as we made our respective ways through the labyrinth of a large corporate empire. We took ourselves into a nearby hostelry to escape the rain and have lunch.
As always on these occasions we re-fought a few old battles through rose tinted glasses. We had sometimes been on the same side in these, sometimes not, and when she made that observation I offered the argument that there should not have been sides: surely the objection should always have been to the benefit of the organisation.
That, she said, was where I had wasted my opportunities, and cited two incidents, about five years apart, where I had moved to operation that I was leading into another part of the corporation, but on both occasions I had, personally, lost out. I could have had a much more successful career if I had put myself first and made sure that I was going to do well out of the changes but, instead, I had put the organisation first.
Both organisation changes had seen me shunted sideways rather than moving on up and, whilst there was recognition of my talents, the lack of self-interest and self-promotion was seen as a weakness: I was too nice.
I’m not sure that I can accept the last point, for I don’t think that I was that nice, but overall I can see that she was right, for, once I got into any sort of position of influence, I was primarily interested in doing what I saw as good for the business, and the consequences for me were only ever secondary.
In some ways that was a weakness, in that I should have thought that element of the proposal through, after all, I had worked everything else out, but, for me, that self-interest was somehow distasteful and so I did nothing about it, although I always tried to look after my team in these deals.
Whatever the outcome I was always able to look into the mirror and feel comfortable with the image that I saw. I got through working to my own code, the one that evolved from the way that I was brought up, and, above all, for the most part I enjoyed my time in a suit. I had some fun, and, for me, that is more valuable than having scrambled up another couple of rungs on the ladder.
on buying lists
I dislike cold calling in all its forms, and I know that I am not alone in that feeling. That said I have, over the years, cold called and have had some success, so I know that it does work. If done well.
I have just dissolved my limited company after 23 years. whilst I have had to weed out cold call emails from my mailbox ever since I set it up, for some reason I have been receiving 5-10 emails a day from a variety of suppliers since I started the dissolution process.
It is patently obvious that these are from people who have bought a list and have not sense checked it or done any basic research, they are just firing off emails and hoping. Good luck to them, but I will not buy from anyone who has not done anything to check whether what they are selling is likely to be relevant to me.
An example would be the ones who want to offer me training packages for my employees: I do not have any employees and offer many of these courses myself. Likewise, mentoring. A look at my website would have told them that I do that too. In fact a look at my website now will tell them that the business is no longer trading.
I mentioned that I had had some success at cold calling down the years, and it was because I did a bit of research before making contact. Maybe it wasn’t really cold calling in the strict sense, more warm calling, but the principle was that, when I made contact, I had a bit more chance because I knew something about the potential client.
I have never bought a list of contacts in any of my various roles, employed or self-employed. I don’t trust them, no matter how carefully verified the seller of such a list tells me it is. I could think of better things to spend my money on.
I do have some sympathy with the people making the calls from call centres, after all they are trying to earn a buck and are just doing what they are told to. But would I deal with the company that has engaged the call centre? No. At least not through any such call.
A personal view, and maybe one that you don’t agree with. You can always tell me why.
life log #14
Well, as noted in my Monday Musing this week, I am still here having avoided another swing of the Reaper’s scythe. This one was an even closer call than that of 2012, albeit that I have been fixed without the need for a longer stay in hospital. Eleven years ago I was in for six and a half weeks, this time just under three.
Both illnesses could have been fatal. In the first the diagnosis was made within thirty six hours and I was told that I had about as long again had I not been admitted. This time it took almost a week as the medics tried to work through what was going on and isolate the problem.
One factor was that I had two things wrong, but, after going down hill rapidly on day five, they worked out where the nastier problem was and fixed it. On waking up from the general anaesthetic I was transformed and am now back home with a plethora of pills.
At almost 71 I have had a decent innings and I accept that the end is coming closer, but I do have the spark of life and am honour bound to the Berkshire Belle to let her go first. She is older than I am, but ladies do tend to last longer, so I have to be able to keep going for a good while yet.
Generally I am pretty fit and it seems that it is these sudden, acute, infections that cause me problems rather than chronic ones. I have no idea why I should have had two now when, apparently, the types of infection that I have had, one Staph, the other Strep, are relatively rare. One was unlucky, two is greedy.
But it shows how fragile life can be. You can be a fit and healthy as you like, but accidents happen and you are gone. As a younger man I felt, as most of do when we are young, that I was invincible. I was in my mid-forties by the time that I accepted that death was inevitable and came to terms with dying. I am an atheist and believe that death will be the end, no heaven or hell, no afterlife. I am content with that, as long as the love of my life wanders off first.
Just an afterthought here. Like me the Hastings Hottie was married once before. news has reached us that her first husband died around the time that I, too, almost kicked the bucket the other week. Life can be strange.
on life and death
Sorry that I have not posted for a few weeks, but I have been in hospital. Some eleven years on from one infection trying to finish me off, another made an attempt, and, like the first one, came close to getting me.
This time I am going to take a while to fully recover. The previous one took nearly six months to get over. This one may take a year, but at least I am still here.
I am in not too bad a condition for 70, but this sort of thing just goes to show how thin the line is. A random event within my body nearly brought an end to everything, but it could have been an accident of some sort. No matter how healthy you are, the Grim Reaper can swipe you away at any moment.
Normal service should be resumed from today onwards. I’ll cover this event in a bit more detail in the next Life Log.
on post nominals
At one time in my career I was entitled to use a run of three post nominals, but, most of the time, I didn’t use them. I would have two sets of business cards, one with, one without, and normally only used the latter. The former only came out for people that I knew would be looking for them. They were one of many things related to status that I coveted until I had earned them, at which point I didn’t really want them anymore.
I have noticed that someone who was recently awarded an MBE has added that post nominal to their social media name, and my instant reaction was, how naff. No doubt they are very proud of the award. They are, like me, from humble origins and perhaps the award means so much more to them, their friends and family So be it.
Where I encountered post nominals most often was in the public sector, and I would wait until those that I was meeting had offered their business cards. If these were PN encrusted, then I would drop my similarly endorsed cards in response. To show that we were in the same club, and that I was in a couple of extra ones too. It was a silly game, but making people feel comfortable with me was an important part of what I was doing.
For the rest I did not give a hoot. If someone asked if I was a member I would tell them, but otherwise I kept quiet about it. I have a lot of sympathy for the Groucho Marx approach and do not want to be a member of the sort of club that would have me as a member.
As it happens I have resigned from all three professional bodies and, I think, have managed to expunge any reference to any of them in my social media presence. I bear them no ill will, I just have no desire to be a part of what they do anymore. I have moved on.
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