gasgas
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My dad once went into a corner shop and bought five packs of chewing gum at 20p each. He put them on the counter and gave the girl a £1 coin. She swiped the packs through the scanner (wrongly) and The Computer That Must Be Obeyed And Is Always Right said £1.20. Girl said "that will be £1.20 please".Quite a few times when I was checking out of Hotels in the Far East the employee would pull up my account on the computer and double check the figures with an abacus before printing out my bill.
'No it won't' dad said, 'it's £1'.
Girlie said "The Till is a Computer and it is always right. £1.20 please".
Dad wondered if the girlie had ever gone to school so he pointed out that five times two is ten, i.e five times 20p is one pound.
'Tell you what', dad said. 'Cancel the transaction and we'll do it again, slowly'. He put the £1 on the counter.
Girlie cancelled the transaction on the till. Dad took one pack, gave it to the girlie and said I'll pay for this out of the £1. Girlie swiped it and dad gave her the £1 coin. She looked at the till, which is a VERY CLEVER computer which told her to give dad 80p change, which she did. Dad put the 80p on the counter.
Dad took another pack and paid for it with 20p. Girlie rang it up on the till and gave no change. That left 60p on the counter.
Dad took another pack - paid 20p and so on until all five packs were bought.
Then dad asked girlie " How much money did I have to start with?"
Girlie: "£1".
Dad: " and how many packs of gum did I buy?"
Girlie: Five
Dad " And how much money have I got left"
Girlie: "Nothing"
Dad said "So as I told you five minutes ago, five packs of gum at 20p cost £1, not £1.20"
Pause for thought . . . . . . . . .
Girlie shouted "YOU'VE CHEATED ME" . . . . but she couldn't work out what dad had done to cheat her out of 20p.
More seriously, it sounds as if that computer was later used by The Post Office . . . . .
I hope the sub postmasters and postmistresses all get:
a) Their wages and pensions from the time of the non-crime, indexed up to 2024 at the same or a greater rate than current PO staff
b) Compensation for trauma, loss of sentimental goods
c) their houses they have lost restored to them, or a better one
d) compensation and replacement of all the furniture, white goods, soft furnishings, garden landscaping
d) compensation for all the expenses they have incurred, hotels, removals,
In other words, all the benefits of what the Government gives in a compulsory relocation package (i.e. a free house, all decorated, furnished, landscaped and removals at no cost to the new owner) plus compensation for trauma and loss of earnings. You and I will pay for it, of course, just as we pay for faulty PPE, and other contracts given to the buddy pals of those who have the power to issue them.
And that the PO / Fujitsu employees who thought up and carried out the crimes should be jailed.
I have my theory, based on my experience working for the GPO when it became BT.
In 1982 the government wanted to privatise the telephone part of the GPO and renamed it BT. They wanted to sell it. I had 8 weeks off work with a bad back (sciatica).
In 1983 as the sale of the telecomms part of the GPO was looming. You want the highest sale price and in order to achieve that, what you want is for a low number of staff producing the highest profit margin. This is known as the cost / earnings ratio and logically if you have low costs and high earnings, you have a nice profitable business and your share price will be high. So you want to lose staff. I was called into the boss's office where 4 wise men were sat round a desk. "Mr Harcourt, you had 8 weeks off work last year. How would you like a medical retirement?"
"What's that?" I asked. Their reply was, and this is their exact words:
"You retire, we give you a lot of money and you go away".
"How much, and where do I sign?"
So they gave me 13 year's worth of redundancy (for 6.5 year's employment) plus a pension. The reason they retired me had little to do with my 8 weeks off work. The fact was that the pensions companies at that time had lots of money and the cheapest way to get the highest share price was to give medical retirements with pensions to as many staff as possible, and get rid of them. This I know to be true because at my next job my boss was the brother of a BT director who told me this is how it was done.
So my theory with the PO scandal is that the same thing with a variation was happenning. The Government wanted to privatise the Post Office and devised a way to a) maximise profits by extracting money from postmasters and mistresses, and b) to reduce the number of staff.
That sounds very cruel - and ineed it is worse than cruel. Someone somewhere made the decision to maximise the Post Office profits prior to the sale.
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