It’s a thought

Wednesday November 21, 2007

Tomorrow it will be one month since I spent almost two hours on the phone trying to drag a bill out of British Gas. I obtained a promise that it’d all be sorted. I phoned again on November 15, to be told that a standard 28-day response was to be expected.  It’s been well over a year since we moved in here, and still no bills.

So I find myself sitting here of a dark morning, dreading tomorrow because I know full well that they’ll not have sorted out the mess and that I shall have to phone them again, be quietly assertive, and then, assuming they can’t satisfy me, dump the problem in the lap of the Energy Supply Ombudsman.

It’s getting to be an urgent issue. Sometime in the not too distant future Graham is going to want to put the house on the market. I don’t like to think what his reaction will be when I tell him we’ll have problems with the sale if we can’t clear this issue.

I’m not sure that large companies are well advised to put all their accounts on one big computer.

I’m darn sure that the government are poorly advised when they do the same with all our personal details.

See, there’s an idiot’s law that governs administration systems, and the bigger the system, the more likely it is to apply. I call it Twonk’s law. Some twonk, in designing the system, will skate over the areas that cover unlikely errors in operation. Some other twonk, in checking the design, will assume that the designer knows what he’s doing and, anyway, it’s a most unlikely error. And then, at event after event during the system production cycle, right through to user acceptance, a further supply of twonks will make the same assumption.

And then, when the system is in operation, some twonk will access the skated-over area, and push the button because all the other buttons so far have worked and, anyway, the system was signed off by layer after layer of management.

Part of Twonk’s law states that the more often a possible error is described as “extremely unlikely” the more it is likely to occur the moment you take your eye off the ball.

Today, it has been revealed, some government-employed twonks in an HM Revenue and Customs office recently pressed a button that dumps the whole of the national child benefit data base onto two CDs–the personal and banking details of 25 million families–which were then stuffed into an unregistered envelope and sent through insecure mail to the National Audit Office.  It never got there.

It’s hard to imagine all the alarm bells that sounded and were missed along the way.

In my system design days I encountered the Twonk mentality more times than I care to remember. At least once for each system, like as not. I don’t know if I should be comforted or not that, after all these years of techological advance, Twonk’s Rule still applies and may be seen in every system that affects our daily lives.

“I don’t suppose you’d like to go live somewhere really wild, and out of reach of all these twonks?” I asked when we were watching Northern Exposure yesterday evening.

“It’s a thought. Certainly, it’s a thought.”