Thursday, July 12, 2012
Bureaucracy revisited
Following the report on May 28th, can now report further bureaucratic fun.
We are still working with the nice people at the NS&I call centre, having successfully completed the setting up of just one out of the three accounts we launched on May 28th. The successful one involved a letter from them printed on a specialised piece of paper and containing a temporary password and us supplying yet another set of security information. How on earth do these people think we are going to keep and keep track of secure copies of all this stuff? And maintain the fiction that we do not peek at each others accounts? A fiction which has to be maintained as I recall one call centre operator getting quite huffy when she quite mistakenly thought that I was doing FIL's banking for him. Threatened all kinds of dire things like freezing the account.
On the other two accounts we were promised the letters containing temporary passwords but these never turned up. And it now turns out that I cannot ask for duplicates unless I can answer some security questions of which I have no recollection and about which I can find no paperwork. Not even in the nearly always helpful gmail. And the first question they wanted me to answer over the phone was so obscure that I have no idea what the right answer is, let alone which I might have told them. My last post suggests that I did indeed supply the answers some security questions but it is odd that I did not keep the paperwork, usually being quite meticulous about such things. Must have been yet another senior moment. Maybe it will turn up mysteriously in six months time when this has all be sorted out otherwise.
All this bother for some quite minor investments. It would have been hugely easier to do something of the same sort with Halifax.
All having been made so much more tiresome by the country being tied up in knots by the data protection act. Simon Jenkins was banging a similar drum in the Guardian yesterday when he pointed to the nonsense that the freedom of information act is dragging us into. As various people have pointed out over the years, the way to hell is often paved with good intentions.
And then I thought that given all the kerfuffle of the last few months it would be interesting to know how my weight is doing. Didn't think to ask them at the hospital yesterday but happening to be at my GP's today I asked the nice people behind the counter there if I could be weighed. Oh no sir, you have to make an appointment to have the nurse take your blood pressure and weigh you. Why don't you try Boots? Well, I did and they don't have a weighing machine any more, they just have a machine into which you put money and it tells you about your fat body mass ratio or something. Why don't you try Lloyds? Which I then did and the nice people there weighed me on their imperial bathroom scales higher grade. Go home clutching a piece of paper saying 14.36 stones. Once I got home I felt sure that it should have said 14 stones 3.6 pounds. But I could not be absolutely sure. Still, either way, after some minutes manipulating the calculator on the PC and the weight conversion tool on the Internet, I seem to have put back on around 4kg in a couple of months, so that is a result of sorts and celebrated by taking the first spin on the bicycle for more than 3 months, a sedate couple of times around the block. Will I be moved to buy a helmet, something I was starting to think about when bulling around on the bullingdons?
The bad news is that there was a time when the sums involved would have counted as mental arithmetic.
I shall probably have a dream tonight about those far off, rose tinted days when railway stations used to have large red person weighing machines and small green plant label printing machines. At least they did at Cambridge railway station.
We are still working with the nice people at the NS&I call centre, having successfully completed the setting up of just one out of the three accounts we launched on May 28th. The successful one involved a letter from them printed on a specialised piece of paper and containing a temporary password and us supplying yet another set of security information. How on earth do these people think we are going to keep and keep track of secure copies of all this stuff? And maintain the fiction that we do not peek at each others accounts? A fiction which has to be maintained as I recall one call centre operator getting quite huffy when she quite mistakenly thought that I was doing FIL's banking for him. Threatened all kinds of dire things like freezing the account.
On the other two accounts we were promised the letters containing temporary passwords but these never turned up. And it now turns out that I cannot ask for duplicates unless I can answer some security questions of which I have no recollection and about which I can find no paperwork. Not even in the nearly always helpful gmail. And the first question they wanted me to answer over the phone was so obscure that I have no idea what the right answer is, let alone which I might have told them. My last post suggests that I did indeed supply the answers some security questions but it is odd that I did not keep the paperwork, usually being quite meticulous about such things. Must have been yet another senior moment. Maybe it will turn up mysteriously in six months time when this has all be sorted out otherwise.
All this bother for some quite minor investments. It would have been hugely easier to do something of the same sort with Halifax.
All having been made so much more tiresome by the country being tied up in knots by the data protection act. Simon Jenkins was banging a similar drum in the Guardian yesterday when he pointed to the nonsense that the freedom of information act is dragging us into. As various people have pointed out over the years, the way to hell is often paved with good intentions.
And then I thought that given all the kerfuffle of the last few months it would be interesting to know how my weight is doing. Didn't think to ask them at the hospital yesterday but happening to be at my GP's today I asked the nice people behind the counter there if I could be weighed. Oh no sir, you have to make an appointment to have the nurse take your blood pressure and weigh you. Why don't you try Boots? Well, I did and they don't have a weighing machine any more, they just have a machine into which you put money and it tells you about your fat body mass ratio or something. Why don't you try Lloyds? Which I then did and the nice people there weighed me on their imperial bathroom scales higher grade. Go home clutching a piece of paper saying 14.36 stones. Once I got home I felt sure that it should have said 14 stones 3.6 pounds. But I could not be absolutely sure. Still, either way, after some minutes manipulating the calculator on the PC and the weight conversion tool on the Internet, I seem to have put back on around 4kg in a couple of months, so that is a result of sorts and celebrated by taking the first spin on the bicycle for more than 3 months, a sedate couple of times around the block. Will I be moved to buy a helmet, something I was starting to think about when bulling around on the bullingdons?
The bad news is that there was a time when the sums involved would have counted as mental arithmetic.
I shall probably have a dream tonight about those far off, rose tinted days when railway stations used to have large red person weighing machines and small green plant label printing machines. At least they did at Cambridge railway station.
# posted by Jim @ 8:14 AM 
