gordonthemoron
Established Member
I was in Eagle & Child, Oxford on sunday. The till wouldn't work so we were given our drinks and paid later 
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RBS payment difficulties
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A lot of nonsense in this thread. While people who travel without any sort of cash need to accept that they're taking a risk, it's perfectly possible that people were looking to buy tickets costing well over £100 - I don't think anyone can reasonably expect people to carry that sort of cash around 'just in case'.
Similarly, expecting railways to just let people travel isn't particularly reasonable.
This seems to be exactly the sort of situation that Unpaid Fares Notices should be used for. As soon as this problem became known, you'd hope that TOCs would issue this advice to ticket office staff and guards. Given that we've not heard of loads of stories of people not being able to travel, I suspect that this is what happened in the majority of cases.
Similarly, expecting railways to just let people travel isn't particularly reasonable.
This seems to be exactly the sort of situation that Unpaid Fares Notices should be used for. As soon as this problem became known, you'd hope that TOCs would issue this advice to ticket office staff and guards. Given that we've not heard of loads of stories of people not being able to travel, I suspect that this is what happened in the majority of cases.
She does travel on a FCC service at least once a year, and she doesn't want to be caught out by one of their RPIs.
bluebirdman
Member
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I was in Eagle & Child, Oxford on sunday. The till wouldn't work so we were given our drinks and paid later
Great pub!
gordonthemoron
Established Member
Great pub!
it is indeed, as shown by the queue of people waiting to get in at opening time
I tended to frequent the Lamb & Flag more often
bluebirdman
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The Lamb is also a decent boozer.
Having moved from Oxford for Bristol for work, I now realise how lucky I was to have so many great pubs on the doorstep! If you're in East Oxford, the James Street Tavern is worth a look.
Hartington
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Trying to work out what causes a specific IT failure can be a real problem. I used to work with IT systems ranging, over the years, from Z80 based systems in the early 80s through to mainframes when I retired.
When testing a system once I found a problem and the programmer said "I wondered if that might happen". Testing in those days was an inexact science so it could have found its' way into the companies we supplied. For many years we had a particular problem that we never, ever, solved. The system involved connected to several airline systems and issued tickets from data in their reservations systems. Just occasionally the system would fail when connected to one particular system. We never succeeded in replicating the problem. It would affect one installation for maybe a week and then disappear only to pop up somewhere else several weeks later. We would install recording datascopes so that we could look at the data as it was sent from the airline system but we never saw any faults in a booking that failed to ticket (even in the control characters such as carriage returns).
Things have moved on and testing is much better so the chances of faults slipping through have reduced. However, the programming and testing all relies on a single point of failure. Us. Humans.
Failures like RBS had this week will continue to occur. It's one of the certainties in life. It's why airliners have triple redundant systems written by three different teams to minimise the risk that they all get the same thing wrong simultaneously.
Any company with any sense will have a fallback for anything they do but increasingly the dependence on the computer is absolute. Airlines again; the check in system for BA failed at Heathrow one morning about 25 years ago when I was trying to get to Manchester. We all hung around for a while and then I heard one of the BA people comment they'd better start using the manual system. Fast forward and it happened again and we just hung around until the system came back.
When it comes to credit cards in particular remember that the introduction and Chip and Pin has moved the goalposts for shops and railways accepting cards. Accepting a card without obtaining a positive authorisation can lead to the shop/railway having to accept the loss if the transaction is subsequently rejected.
What happens when an RPI can't read a smart card like "The Key"? How do they know whether the reader or the card is at fault or whether someone is pulling a fast one?
When testing a system once I found a problem and the programmer said "I wondered if that might happen". Testing in those days was an inexact science so it could have found its' way into the companies we supplied. For many years we had a particular problem that we never, ever, solved. The system involved connected to several airline systems and issued tickets from data in their reservations systems. Just occasionally the system would fail when connected to one particular system. We never succeeded in replicating the problem. It would affect one installation for maybe a week and then disappear only to pop up somewhere else several weeks later. We would install recording datascopes so that we could look at the data as it was sent from the airline system but we never saw any faults in a booking that failed to ticket (even in the control characters such as carriage returns).
Things have moved on and testing is much better so the chances of faults slipping through have reduced. However, the programming and testing all relies on a single point of failure. Us. Humans.
Failures like RBS had this week will continue to occur. It's one of the certainties in life. It's why airliners have triple redundant systems written by three different teams to minimise the risk that they all get the same thing wrong simultaneously.
Any company with any sense will have a fallback for anything they do but increasingly the dependence on the computer is absolute. Airlines again; the check in system for BA failed at Heathrow one morning about 25 years ago when I was trying to get to Manchester. We all hung around for a while and then I heard one of the BA people comment they'd better start using the manual system. Fast forward and it happened again and we just hung around until the system came back.
When it comes to credit cards in particular remember that the introduction and Chip and Pin has moved the goalposts for shops and railways accepting cards. Accepting a card without obtaining a positive authorisation can lead to the shop/railway having to accept the loss if the transaction is subsequently rejected.
What happens when an RPI can't read a smart card like "The Key"? How do they know whether the reader or the card is at fault or whether someone is pulling a fast one?
And, it would seem, so can (some?) TOCs. Earlier this year I was asked to sign an old style manual credit card receipt at Manchester Piccadilly (no idea why as I didn't ask).
Gemz91
Member
Would imagine on certain routes where stations don't have ticket offices it would take a while to issue unpaid fare notices for everyone who boards the train!
I used to work in the Williams & Glyns IT department, later merging into the RBS, and this sort of event really embarrasses me even now. Testing, in those days, was far from being an inexact science, and I cannot remember one major system failure of this magnitude in my time there. It all depended on the professionalism of the staff, and, in the years after the merger, this was already being diluted. OK, the technology is different, but not that much.
Tetchytyke
Veteran Member
It comes down to companies valuing their IT staff as an essential part of the core business. Too many of them don't do that, choosing to outsource to India, and then they wonder why these problems happen.
I've seen a similar thing at my employer. They've decided to downgrade all the IT support staff, causing the experienced ones to leave, and now they're at a loss to understand why the email servers and the website keep crashing. No, I don't understand either :roll:
I've seen a similar thing at my employer. They've decided to downgrade all the IT support staff, causing the experienced ones to leave, and now they're at a loss to understand why the email servers and the website keep crashing. No, I don't understand either :roll:
gordonthemoron
Established Member
I wonder if RBS should have/did go(ne) into STIP (STand In Processing) with VISA/Mastercard to permit authorisations to be processed or if they had set up their STIP parameters in such a way as to decline most transactions
It seems that RBS senior management believe this is the route cause of the issue - they've said they've not invested enough in their IT systems for decades(!)
I'm sure this will continue for a while when the people at the top keep getting bonuses whilst failing to do the job properly, as long as the shareholders are making money, etc.
In the past RBS were keen to turn all their IT staff into managers or make them redundant. They then sent all the hands on IT work out to India.
Nothing wrong with Indians work ethic as far as I'm aware but they didn't have the history and knowledge built up over the time of the systems involved. With hind sight Ex-Sir Fred Goodwin has a lot to answer for it seems. Still I'm sure some lower IT person will be blamed.
Tetchytyke
Veteran Member
It's not that, but it's not that Indians are lazy/stupid, I quite agree.
Most of the Indian companies are sub-contractors, and they won't do anything unless it is billable. They will do what they're told to do, but they won't think outside the box or fix something that they notice whilst they're in the system.
Most companies don't realise all the little things that in-house IT employees do until it is too late.
I quiet agree. In my previous job, contracting, the IT was out sourced. The IT modernisation was behind schedule. My computer failed. It took 2 months to decide who should pay because it was out of warrenty and we should have been using virtual machine's by then.
I had to use a computer that wasn't up to the job. So it delayed my work costing the company more money.
In my current job I am based within an internal IT department where we are modernising. I may not yet have a virtual computer but we are not arguing over contract details and who should pay for things. I much prefer it.
Our boss also likes to point out how the IT costs are lower than similar companies who have out sourced.
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RBS's offshore IT staff are directly employed, not outsourced.
I work in IT in a financial company, and the amount of legacy technology in the industry is staggering. Where I work we're very keen not to have dead code and systems that go untouched, and are constantly upgrading and cleaning things up
A previous employer had machines they could no longer log into, that they had no idea what they did, and about which no current employees knew anything about. So they were left on doing whatever they did as no-one dared shut them down. Whilst this is an extreme example, it demonstrates that unless your staff are constantly interacting with the systems, then you will get bit rot, and when it all goes wrong there'll be no-one who has any idea about how to fix it.
I work in IT in a financial company, and the amount of legacy technology in the industry is staggering. Where I work we're very keen not to have dead code and systems that go untouched, and are constantly upgrading and cleaning things up
A previous employer had machines they could no longer log into, that they had no idea what they did, and about which no current employees knew anything about. So they were left on doing whatever they did as no-one dared shut them down. Whilst this is an extreme example, it demonstrates that unless your staff are constantly interacting with the systems, then you will get bit rot, and when it all goes wrong there'll be no-one who has any idea about how to fix it.
An extreme example maybe, but not uncommon I suspect. We had a similar situation and the machines were left running for some years. Eventually, the building housing them was being vacated and a decision was made to switch them off and wait for the howls from offices around the country. In fact, there was not a whisper ....... and no one ever found out what the original purpose of the machines was.
PHILIPE
Veteran Member
A call to the Indians can also be very frustrating as they are so difficult to understand.
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