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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Dec 3, 2023 20:59:46 GMT
Employment is almost 100%, production efficiency is one of the lowest and now we are repeatedly told its all going to be hell on earth unless we import immigrant labour?
There is a theory which states, crap occupies the space provided for it. Take a simple thing like an NHS appointment when it was all done in books with pens. They had to keep things simple because of the amount of time it took staff to operate manual admin systems. Now they all have computers they can ask hundreds of questions and it is no skin off their noses since the computer reads all the forms and does what it needs to do. However at the other end of it is the punter who finds everything takes many times as long, like say buying a ticket on a train. Once you said how much to so and so, you would pay the cash and the ticket would be in your hands straight away. Now they jerk you around about window facing seats, combined offers on train + bus deals, the shit is endless.
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Post by Pacifico on Dec 3, 2023 22:11:55 GMT
I don't know if it is computers but currently my wife is going though investigative treatment with the NHS and it's breathtaking how inefficient it is. If you wanted to design a system that wasted more time and money you would struggle.
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Post by steppenwolf on Dec 4, 2023 8:06:57 GMT
The more technology we get the worse it gets, or so it seems. The NHS computer system was a mess from the start as it evolved piecemeal so there are a lot of different GP systems and hospital systems that don't communicate. The govt then wasted £12 billion on a new integrated system but they got the design wrong - they made it a centrally located system rather than a distributed one so it had to be scrapped.
I worked on one of the new police systems and again the police got it wrong. There are 47 different police forces and, instead of pooling their resources and all adopting the same "Command and Control" system, they all sent out separate tenders. I don't know how it worked in the end but it's noticeable that the rate of crime detection is at record lows - despite the fact that they have new computer systems and new technology like DNA and CCTV. In fact the police don't seem to do anything any more.
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Post by johnofgwent on Dec 4, 2023 9:54:17 GMT
I’ve worked with IT professionally since 1982.
My first computer program was run in 1966. I was nine years old and it printed the word ‘hello’ on a teleprinter attached to an IBM 6400 minicomputer the size of two office desks.
I mention that yo explain how long ‘computers’ have been a part of my everyday life. I suggest few on here have had the day to day exposure i have had, courtesy of my father snd his business contacts.
What stands out starkly in my years of working professionally in IT is the utter pigs breakfast non IT literate wankers make of so called business analysis and system design. The degree to which some twat in a suit has hot stuck in to overcomplicating a problem in order to make their role in the job look good and their huge bloated invoices justified.
Perhaps the finest example of this was a 2014 contract at Clarks Footwear. I was hired to build a system that injected sales and order data in a flexible programmable format into an ordering system tgey wanted to have in place for Black Friday online sales.
I arrived to find the man who would be signing my timesheets fighting a rearguard action against an upper management decision to outsource the whole thing to a bunch of suit wearing wasters in a monolithic company with no obvious positive input to the project.
I left three months later somewhat richer but with none of the code i produced integrated. In reality it was ditched but the monolithic suit wearers failed utterly. Clarks never did get their new website.
I have for decades found my best work and most productive achievements come when i work not with IT graduates but with graduates with years of experience in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, hard sciences and even art. The most expensive would-be failure i ever succeeded in turning round was done in a team including a microbiologist, a geologist and a sculptor. We saved the betting world from a disaster caused by idiot Pakistani so called IT graduates most of whom had no idea, and our success came not from paper qualifications but the simple fact that every sodding one of us INCLUDING the guy who was getting money for his works of sculpture cut our teeth not on ‘programming’ computers but on making the bloody things DO things for us to make tbe jobs we did for a living easier.
As in, i used to program computers to analyse the data from my experiments. My microbiologist associate programmed them to control his bug cultures. My geologist friend used them as i did, to analyse his in the field measurements.
None of us felt the need for a business analyst to invent an insanely complicated model of user supplication before the idol of user interface. We just made the bloody things do what we needed them to do against a set of requirements we fully understood
In my grandfather’s day computers were programmed by men in white lab coats to solve mathematical problems and assholes in suits trying to get in on tbe act were generally taken out and shot as Nazi spies.
I can’t help thinking they had the right idea
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Dec 4, 2023 15:02:33 GMT
I’ve worked with IT professionally since 1982. My first computer program was run in 1966. I was nine years old and it printed the word ‘hello’ on a teleprinter attached to an IBM 6400 minicomputer the size of two office desks. I mention that yo explain how long ‘computers’ have been a part of my everyday life. I suggest few on here have had the day to day exposure i have had, courtesy of my father snd his business contacts. What stands out starkly in my years of working professionally in IT is the utter pigs breakfast non IT literate wankers make of so called business analysis and system design. The degree to which some twat in a suit has hot stuck in to overcomplicating a problem in order to make their role in the job look good and their huge bloated invoices justified. Perhaps the finest example of this was a 2014 contract at Clarks Footwear. I was hired to build a system that injected sales and order data in a flexible programmable format into an ordering system tgey wanted to have in place for Black Friday online sales. I arrived to find the man who would be signing my timesheets fighting a rearguard action against an upper management decision to outsource the whole thing to a bunch of suit wearing wasters in a monolithic company with no obvious positive input to the project. I left three months later somewhat richer but with none of the code i produced integrated. In reality it was ditched but the monolithic suit wearers failed utterly. Clarks never did get their new website. I have for decades found my best work and most productive achievements come when i work not with IT graduates but with graduates with years of experience in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, hard sciences and even art. The most expensive would-be failure i ever succeeded in turning round was done in a team including a microbiologist, a geologist and a sculptor. We saved the betting world from a disaster caused by idiot Pakistani so called IT graduates most of whom had no idea, and our success came not from paper qualifications but the simple fact that every sodding one of us INCLUDING the guy who was getting money for his works of sculpture cut our teeth not on ‘programming’ computers but on making the bloody things DO things for us to make tbe jobs we did for a living easier. As in, i used to program computers to analyse the data from my experiments. My microbiologist associate programmed them to control his bug cultures. My geologist friend used them as i did, to analyse his in the field measurements. None of us felt the need for a business analyst to invent an insanely complicated model of user supplication before the idol of user interface. We just made the bloody things do what we needed them to do against a set of requirements we fully understood In my grandfather’s day computers were programmed by men in white lab coats to solve mathematical problems and assholes in suits trying to get in on tbe act were generally taken out and shot as Nazi spies. I can’t help thinking they had the right idea Remember when the US department of defence blocked Android's use on Chinese phones? Huawei were up shit creek since they had top-selling phones but now the software was useless. They looked around their firm and the closest they could find was a project someone had going in the IOT department. It was some sort of low level operating system for IOT SoCs and had a microkernel architecture. It could run in 128k of RAM. Now a couple or so years later the codebase is 100 million lines. It works as well apparently. Indeed it is such a hit that Samsung are now going to have it on their phones. They would not do that if it were a buggy pile of crap.
Anyway, you tell me what I already know. I deduced a lot of it from being an outsider who read the sort of stuff these people would write, including job ads to do their work. My parents were friends with someone in their area who had a son who was "high up in computers" and he was the kind who was coining it in as a suit. He had a degree in French. I guess that illustrates how fucked up it is. How the hell do you understand computers by speaking French to them? The mind boggles.
Yes I accept the engineering in Blighty is a major hit on productivity, but there is another factor as well. Lets say you have an NHS form: name, address, telephone number, NI number. Those may be required information the NHS needs. As you also know the NHS is top-heavy with manager types. They have a lot of meetings. Each manager is trying to prove his prowess. One day a manager brings up at a meeting, what if the person is blind, we might need to know so we can brail them or get a trained person to deal with them. In isolation this makes sense, so they all agree to add a box you can tick on the form if you are blind. a little while later the similar thing repeats. What if you are black, or you are a Muslim and need a prayer mat. The problem is the process is strictly additive. Those who have acquired real estate on the form will keep it there. It might even be for political reasons. NHS collaborates with Stonewall. Stonewall think, if we can get a few questions about homos then that will raise the awareness of homos, no utilitarian reasoning, just pure parasitic crap which gets in. And on and on it goes.
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Post by johnofgwent on Dec 4, 2023 16:31:10 GMT
Its a bit more straightforward, Baron
In short almost every system i see is over engineered and top-heavy. It’s as if analysts have tripped over themselves to add complexity which in almost all cases reduce functionality.
Oh by the way i am indebted to a doctor of linguistics or whatever he called himself at The Louvre. And anyone flying out of the UK to go anywhere needs to be, too
While working for the UK CAA i found their existing Air Accident Database built on an ancient flat file system for which no one had any user guides. A professor of archaeology at the uni my wife ran part of the admissions dept knew of this chap working at the Louvre researching mediaeval literature. Fortunately his command of his own language was a little more modern, and it took less than ten minutes to be shown how to download the literally gigabytes of database manuals in a TIFF format microfiche ….
Some stufents of French have their uses ….
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Dec 5, 2023 1:07:25 GMT
Its a bit more straightforward, Baron In short almost every system i see is over engineered and top-heavy. It’s as if analysts have tripped over themselves to add complexity which in almost all cases reduce functionality. Oh by the way i am indebted to a doctor of linguistics or whatever he called himself at The Louvre. And anyone flying out of the UK to go anywhere needs to be, too While working for the UK CAA i found their existing Air Accident Database built on an ancient flat file system for which no one had any user guides. A professor of archaeology at the uni my wife ran part of the admissions dept knew of this chap working at the Louvre researching mediaeval literature. Fortunately his command of his own language was a little more modern, and it took less than ten minutes to be shown how to download the literally gigabytes of database manuals in a TIFF format microfiche …. Some stufents of French have their uses …. I think it is often a case of successive approximation when building a structure. Programs are always going to see new features added, so you have to keep the data structure sensible as it is changed. If you see a way to make it less code + faster + more functionality, you tend to go for it. I think it is a bit of a knack that you learn to spot simplifications in vast amounts of code. I'm writing a compiler at the moment and I'm just adding more features to the language as they are needed in an iterative way. My method is before you add loads more code, you want to straighten out the code of the last feature added, often spotting how your new code is going to mesh into it. Like a change I'm doing right now is to switch from it all running on one computer to the code spit up onto several machine which are networked. You'd think that was a complicated hack, but it turns out very little needs to be altered. That's the beauty of having well-structured code. I hear many industries use this agile/scrum kind of management system which is driving programmers nuts. |
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Post by Orac on Dec 5, 2023 8:42:26 GMT
I’ve worked with IT professionally since 1982. My first computer program was run in 1966. I was nine years old and it printed the word ‘hello’ on a teleprinter attached to an IBM 6400 minicomputer the size of two office desks. I mention that yo explain how long ‘computers’ have been a part of my everyday life. I suggest few on here have had the day to day exposure i have had, courtesy of my father snd his business contacts. What stands out starkly in my years of working professionally in IT is the utter pigs breakfast non IT literate wankers make of so called business analysis and system design. The degree to which some twat in a suit has hot stuck in to overcomplicating a problem in order to make their role in the job look good and their huge bloated invoices justified. Perhaps the finest example of this was a 2014 contract at Clarks Footwear. I was hired to build a system that injected sales and order data in a flexible programmable format into an ordering system tgey wanted to have in place for Black Friday online sales. I arrived to find the man who would be signing my timesheets fighting a rearguard action against an upper management decision to outsource the whole thing to a bunch of suit wearing wasters in a monolithic company with no obvious positive input to the project. I left three months later somewhat richer but with none of the code i produced integrated. In reality it was ditched but the monolithic suit wearers failed utterly. Clarks never did get their new website. I have for decades found my best work and most productive achievements come when i work not with IT graduates but with graduates with years of experience in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, hard sciences and even art. The most expensive would-be failure i ever succeeded in turning round was done in a team including a microbiologist, a geologist and a sculptor. We saved the betting world from a disaster caused by idiot Pakistani so called IT graduates most of whom had no idea, and our success came not from paper qualifications but the simple fact that every sodding one of us INCLUDING the guy who was getting money for his works of sculpture cut our teeth not on ‘programming’ computers but on making the bloody things DO things for us to make tbe jobs we did for a living easier. As in, i used to program computers to analyse the data from my experiments. My microbiologist associate programmed them to control his bug cultures. My geologist friend used them as i did, to analyse his in the field measurements. None of us felt the need for a business analyst to invent an insanely complicated model of user supplication before the idol of user interface. We just made the bloody things do what we needed them to do against a set of requirements we fully understood In my grandfather’s day computers were programmed by men in white lab coats to solve mathematical problems and assholes in suits trying to get in on tbe act were generally taken out and shot as Nazi spies. I can’t help thinking they had the right idea It seems to be a political problem that some people have a knack for the kind simplification that is very valuable in this context and some people simply don't and can't do it. It's also not something that can itself be taught. It seems that a lot of what has happened in IT since about 2000 has been about preventing this being a valuable skill, so someone who has 'been on a course' and has no skill or imagination, isn't at a disadvantage to someone with a brain. |
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Post by johnofgwent on Dec 5, 2023 8:58:34 GMT
Its a bit more straightforward, Baron In short almost every system i see is over engineered and top-heavy. It’s as if analysts have tripped over themselves to add complexity which in almost all cases reduce functionality. Oh by the way i am indebted to a doctor of linguistics or whatever he called himself at The Louvre. And anyone flying out of the UK to go anywhere needs to be, too While working for the UK CAA i found their existing Air Accident Database built on an ancient flat file system for which no one had any user guides. A professor of archaeology at the uni my wife ran part of the admissions dept knew of this chap working at the Louvre researching mediaeval literature. Fortunately his command of his own language was a little more modern, and it took less than ten minutes to be shown how to download the literally gigabytes of database manuals in a TIFF format microfiche …. Some stufents of French have their uses …. I think it is often a case of successive approximation when building a structure. Programs are always going to see new features added, so you have to keep the data structure sensible as it is changed. If you see a way to make it less code + faster + more functionality, you tend to go for it. I think it is a bit of a knack that you learn to spot simplifications in vast amounts of code. I'm writing a compiler at the moment and I'm just adding more features to the language as they are needed in an iterative way. My method is before you add loads more code, you want to straighten out the code of the last feature added, often spotting how your new code is going to mesh into it. Like a change I'm doing right now is to switch from it all running on one computer to the code spit up onto several machine which are networked. You'd think that was a complicated hack, but it turns out very little needs to be altered. That's the beauty of having well-structured code. I hear many industries use this agile/scrum kind of management system which is driving programmers nuts. I think that’s a different problem I mean yes, there is a problem i see all the time, which is you slave away building the better mousetrap and when you have succeeded in building the empire state building version of a better mousetrap and have 100,000 boxed ready for sale some Phineas T Barnum loudmouth comes along and says ‘what your empire state mousetrap needs is the equivalent of jacking the building up and digging out the foundations under it and create a basement we never thought about until we saw the finished product’ A real world example of that was the Tranche 4 gas deregulation. In the shadow of requirements and regulations that made it stark that it would be illegal to sell both gas and electricity we developed a program to handle gas sales and having perfected it, we had to build a basement under it to redesign it to handle electic only and duel fuel customers. But the problem i see is overcomplicated over-engineering from the off where nothing is yet built. It does not help that computer languages such as Ada have such a wide range of user defined and variable customisable fields to hold data you hesitate before you choose one of eight different ways of defining the data type to store an integer. You may think that crazy but i swear to god it’s true i had a breakdown while trying to decide whether the nuclear power station at Torness should store integers as INTEGER, LONG INTEGER or some user defined type either -32768 .. 32667 or the 128 bit variant thereof I literally sat at my desk looked at the dozens of possibilities stared blankly into space for 30 minutes did sod all walked out of the room went to a pub and drank myself under the table. I went freelance about two months later. Never looked back. The designers of Ariane Five didn’t understand the problem i could see staring at me out of the abyss which is why their software and all its hardware ended in a million pieces in a Louisiana Swamp Dad never had this shit when he weaponised an IIBM accounting computer to do the AVRO Vulcan’s targeting system. FORTRAN made every variable name starting with the letters I J K and L (16 bit) integers and anything else a (32 bit ?? Float). Simples as the meerkats say |
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Post by johnofgwent on Dec 5, 2023 9:09:14 GMT
I’ve worked with IT professionally since 1982. My first computer program was run in 1966. I was nine years old and it printed the word ‘hello’ on a teleprinter attached to an IBM 6400 minicomputer the size of two office desks. I mention that yo explain how long ‘computers’ have been a part of my everyday life. I suggest few on here have had the day to day exposure i have had, courtesy of my father snd his business contacts. What stands out starkly in my years of working professionally in IT is the utter pigs breakfast non IT literate wankers make of so called business analysis and system design. The degree to which some twat in a suit has hot stuck in to overcomplicating a problem in order to make their role in the job look good and their huge bloated invoices justified. Perhaps the finest example of this was a 2014 contract at Clarks Footwear. I was hired to build a system that injected sales and order data in a flexible programmable format into an ordering system tgey wanted to have in place for Black Friday online sales. I arrived to find the man who would be signing my timesheets fighting a rearguard action against an upper management decision to outsource the whole thing to a bunch of suit wearing wasters in a monolithic company with no obvious positive input to the project. I left three months later somewhat richer but with none of the code i produced integrated. In reality it was ditched but the monolithic suit wearers failed utterly. Clarks never did get their new website. I have for decades found my best work and most productive achievements come when i work not with IT graduates but with graduates with years of experience in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, hard sciences and even art. The most expensive would-be failure i ever succeeded in turning round was done in a team including a microbiologist, a geologist and a sculptor. We saved the betting world from a disaster caused by idiot Pakistani so called IT graduates most of whom had no idea, and our success came not from paper qualifications but the simple fact that every sodding one of us INCLUDING the guy who was getting money for his works of sculpture cut our teeth not on ‘programming’ computers but on making the bloody things DO things for us to make tbe jobs we did for a living easier. As in, i used to program computers to analyse the data from my experiments. My microbiologist associate programmed them to control his bug cultures. My geologist friend used them as i did, to analyse his in the field measurements. None of us felt the need for a business analyst to invent an insanely complicated model of user supplication before the idol of user interface. We just made the bloody things do what we needed them to do against a set of requirements we fully understood In my grandfather’s day computers were programmed by men in white lab coats to solve mathematical problems and assholes in suits trying to get in on tbe act were generally taken out and shot as Nazi spies. I can’t help thinking they had the right idea It seems to be a political problem that some people have a knack for the kind simplification that is very valuable in this context and some people simply don't and can't do it. It's also not something that can itself be taught. It seems that a lot of what has happened in IT since about 2000 has been about preventing this being a valuable skill, so someone who has 'been on a course' and has no skill or imagination, isn't at a disadvantage to someone with a brain. I see in pictures. I can’t explain. Like Cassandra doomed to have her prophecies come true and no one believe her, i have this ability to see things and project them. But i can’t easily and quickly put it in words. My line manager, IT manager, Project Manager and IT Director at the bank have got used to it. Left to myself i will engineer a test strategy and test cases and script up something that shows the problem and from that one of the four of us, often me but increasingly now one of them, will find a fix. At the moment it works because when i get uneasy about something i have been able to show in a week or maybe ten days why doing it the way others suggest would get us fined millions and i’ve been able to do this for over two years so they currently feel i’m worth the salary, a bit like the Eureka man in my early career who the company left to his own devices because five years ago he made them thirty eight million in thirty minutes of thinking and might do that again and even if he didn’t, thirty eight million in profit entitles him to sit there and ponder and potter about until he retired !! |
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Post by The Squeezed Middle on Dec 5, 2023 9:59:05 GMT
I think that the problem in many cases is that management spec systems without any reference to the end user.
That's certainly the case in the civil service. I'm currently saddled with an overly complex system which has replaced a very simple and efficient one. Now what was previously accomplished with a single keystroke has become a nightmarish, multi-stage operation.
This, we are told, is because the system makes it easier for management to produce the reports that they want. But it overlooks that it now takes us ten times longer to do the actual job. And of course the same management that introduced this nonsense now demand to know why our department has suddenly become so much less efficient.
And that seems to be a problem across the board: Practitioners are not asked what they need, they're simply told what they're going to get usually by management with no idea of what the job actually entails.
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Post by Orac on Dec 5, 2023 10:45:00 GMT
Basic risk analysis shows that an off the shelf solution that doesn't do the job at all (but is nobody's fault) is a far better fit than customization that does 99% of the job but is someone's fault.
The whole domain is chock full of people who should really be doing another job.
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Dec 5, 2023 13:07:17 GMT
I think it is often a case of successive approximation when building a structure. Programs are always going to see new features added, so you have to keep the data structure sensible as it is changed. If you see a way to make it less code + faster + more functionality, you tend to go for it. I think it is a bit of a knack that you learn to spot simplifications in vast amounts of code. I'm writing a compiler at the moment and I'm just adding more features to the language as they are needed in an iterative way. My method is before you add loads more code, you want to straighten out the code of the last feature added, often spotting how your new code is going to mesh into it. Like a change I'm doing right now is to switch from it all running on one computer to the code spit up onto several machine which are networked. You'd think that was a complicated hack, but it turns out very little needs to be altered. That's the beauty of having well-structured code. I hear many industries use this agile/scrum kind of management system which is driving programmers nuts. I think that’s a different problem I mean yes, there is a problem i see all the time, which is you slave away building the better mousetrap and when you have succeeded in building the empire state building version of a better mousetrap and have 100,000 boxed ready for sale some Phineas T Barnum loudmouth comes along and says ‘what your empire state mousetrap needs is the equivalent of jacking the building up and digging out the foundations under it and create a basement we never thought about until we saw the finished product’ A real world example of that was the Tranche 4 gas deregulation. In the shadow of requirements and regulations that made it stark that it would be illegal to sell both gas and electricity we developed a program to handle gas sales and having perfected it, we had to build a basement under it to redesign it to handle electic only and duel fuel customers. But the problem i see is overcomplicated over-engineering from the off where nothing is yet built. It does not help that computer languages such as Ada have such a wide range of user defined and variable customisable fields to hold data you hesitate before you choose one of eight different ways of defining the data type to store an integer. You may think that crazy but i swear to god it’s true i had a breakdown while trying to decide whether the nuclear power station at Torness should store integers as INTEGER, LONG INTEGER or some user defined type either -32768 .. 32667 or the 128 bit variant thereof I literally sat at my desk looked at the dozens of possibilities stared blankly into space for 30 minutes did sod all walked out of the room went to a pub and drank myself under the table. I went freelance about two months later. Never looked back. The designers of Ariane Five didn’t understand the problem i could see staring at me out of the abyss which is why their software and all its hardware ended in a million pieces in a Louisiana Swamp Dad never had this shit when he weaponised an IIBM accounting computer to do the AVRO Vulcan’s targeting system. FORTRAN made every variable name starting with the letters I J K and L (16 bit) integers and anything else a (32 bit ?? Float). Simples as the meerkats say I'm struggling with this as well. I have it working at the moment with a 32 bit fixed point system so it runs fast as it uses integer maths, but I probably want to move to 64bit, although being a 32 bit machine that really does not fit very neatly. It's almost an intractable problem trying to keep the system neat and simple yet give it maximum flexibility. I did add a feature so as to enable it to define variables with different scope, and that was one of those hacks also that turned out to work with a few surface tweaks. I guess you win some and lose some.
Anyway, the thing with what I'm doing is you really need to keep a working version so you can play with the product and see that it works in practical situations. Without intermediate testing you may overlook a problem that the longer undiscovered, the more work it would be to put it right.Indeed this is why i have decided to move to a multiprocessor system because the network is wireless and one part of the system may lose contact with another part, so all hell breaks lose. My solution here is one of those solutions I have a high degree of confidence it is correct, whereas I have a problem with maintaining state in a program which i can deal with in many ways and none seem to be clearly the one. This is why I'm having a long think about it, so we go back to the idea of plan before proceeding.
What managers don't get is there is not a right rule of thumb on how you manage each part of the project. One problem prefers one approach where another problem favours the opposite. I'm also very mindful of just adding complexity to operation for each feature. If i went down that road I'd end up with a language as complicated as modern C, and that loses the main reason for doing this, which is the "easy to program" holy grail. This thing though is partly experimental. I've been looking at some maths though recently to try and gain some inspiration. Have you come across the maths of category theory and type theory? It's very arcane, but said to be useful in language design.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 5, 2023 18:33:25 GMT
Everything we used to do in work re training was once done on paper, but is now done online. It takes a whole lot longer, the system often malfunctions, and sometimes all you get is the spinning wheel of doom as the training module refuses to load. It also every now and again refuses to recognise valid passwords which have to be sorted by a manager phoning India.
And as for simple things like loyalty cards, used to be the case that they were always in the form of an actual plastic card, which required a quick scan of the barcode taking two seconds, job done. Now customers have been encouraged to put the damned things on their phones which many of them dont seem able to access properly. We are not trained to do it for them and are in any case not allowed to handle their phones. The amount of faffing about with their phones that some of them seem to find necessary truly is a wonder to behold. And of course most of their discounts depend upon scanning a loyalty card, and the ones who dont know how to use their phones nevertheless do not bother to bring an actual plastic card. Many a long suffering customer has been stuck in a queue behind such an absolute tit.
Just examples from my day job of how the advance of technology is making everything slower and so much less reliable and more hassle. Computers may do stuff so much faster than us. But so much technology requires a human operator who knows what they are doing, and there is the problem right there.
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Post by borchester on Dec 5, 2023 19:15:02 GMT
Dunno.
I am in the middle of a row with my local council, which requires me to send endless emails. I am also holding the fort for my son who represents a lot of people who really don't like paying taxes. And then there are the Christmas presents and concert tickets that I have bought on line. And the various bills I have paid in a similar manner.
Apart from making a few pots of coffee and pumping ship, I have not moved away from the monitor all day, but I reckon that I have earned my beer and bacon.
So one way and another, I reckon computers have made the UK more efficient and led to a considerable improvement in my life style
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