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Alex Bloor, Banking collapse, NatWest banking pr disaster, NatWest computer crash, NatWst parody song, RBS group, Royal Bank of Scotland scandal, thathairybloke
There are few in Britain who have not been touched by the wholesale failure of the two enormous newly state owned British banking giants, RBS and Nat West, whose entire computer networks have crashed, with wages being unpaid and people unable to move home as the lawyers cannot see that funds have transferred. There are screeds of protest messages at the Nat West site and Twitter is afire with indignation and rage.
Whether this has anything to do with both banks having chosen to unload entire teams of highly skilled UK based IT staff in preference for off shoring the computer functions to India is as yet unclear, whether it is symptomatic of a deeper underlying malaise in the whole structure of western banking cannot yet be divined, but what is certain is that this has been a disaster for both Banks with hundreds of thousands of private and corporate clients on the warpath.
Still, you can count on the Brits to see it through with a song and a smile. Which is exactly what Alex Bloor aka “thathairybloke” has done with the above Pet Shop Boys parody.
A delight and more than safe for work!
Copyright David Macadam 2012
In discussion it has become clear that this whole business is the result of hot-desking.
Some months ago Mr Macadam had a long discussion with Virgin Media about our broadband connection and the failure of their box to allow us access to the internet.
Listening to his conversation with “Morris” who was apparently diagnosing the problem from India was, in itself, a joy. Mr M. suggested that in the old days of TeleWest a nice man in dungarees, in whom one could have faith, would have turned up, fiddled about with things and had our system up and running … but i digress!
The long and the short of it is that we have both agreed a hypothesis that Morris has accidentally hot-desked to the Nat West/RBS side of the office, and what he thought was diagnosing a broadband connection (which he finds challenging and cannot manage in his substantive role) turned out to be the misconnection of an entirely different system.
So if you pop your card into an ATM and find Virgin Catch-up appearing on the screen, you will know we were right!!!
outsourcing?
Sorry slipped in a bit of manager-speak there! Outsourcing or off-shoring is where a company takes a function that used to be done in-house (with-in the company) like say, Finance, Call-centres, or here IT and then gets a separate company to provide this function for it which they now buy-in as a service. The jobs are usually done in a foreign jurisdiction such as Brazil, China or India where the staff are cheaper, the regulatory environment slacker, the involvement of Unions non existant and Labour relations easier and the tax breaks greater. You dont need to worry about extra provisions for the workers as in a First World economy, no pensions or cheeky little extras. The problems are pretty bloody obvious. The staff are not as closely controlled, they lack the specialist knowledge of the systems, or a feeling for the corporate culture. They are poorly trained, tend not to think for themselves and simply “follow the script”, and this lack of managerial oversight means the function is slack and more likely to fail, as indeed a lot of people suspect happened here where an “outsourced” datebase upgrade was botched with disasterous oucomes for the company and its reputation. Not such a cheap option now eh?
penny wise….50 dollar foolish…..
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