Takes from the taxpayer, gives to the old – by squishing a bug in Thatcherite benefits system
- Reference: 1611908110
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/01/29/on_call/
- Source link:
Today's tale of public sector woe comes from a reader dubbed "Andrew" by the Regomiser who was working for a county council in the north of England.
[2]
"They had IBM mainframes running PL1," he recalled. "I was a programmer and also on call for problems."
Originally introduced in 1979 (just like the Thatcher government), the IBM 4341 Processor Andrew worked with was an impressive beast. [3]Big Blue claimed compatibility with System/370 and a boost in execution speed "up to 3.2 times of a System/370 Model 138 with one million characters."
[4]
An IBM 3278 Model 2A console, with a breath-taking 1,920-character display and keyboard, could be used to operate the device and the processor used memory chips that could store "64,000 bits of information."
Heady stuff.
"The languages in use were PL1 RPGII and Filetab," explained Andrew. The council itself ran the rents and housing benefits system for all the local councils in the area.
You can drive a car with your feet, you can operate a sewing machine with your feet. Same goes for computers obviously [5]READ MORE
As is so often the case when a government changes (or a new minister arrives with a desire to make a name for themself), processes get overhauled. Of immediate impact to Andrew was a new housing benefit system, which the council team duly designed, specified, and implemented in-house. No expensive consultants needed here, oh no.
"It didn't take long for a weird problem to arise," he told us. "Some pensioners were getting their housing benefit automatically terminated by the system. No warning, it just stopped the payments."
Those who remember some of the more brutal changes brought in by the Thatcher regime (or enlightened updates, depending on which side of the political divide you sit) would be forgiven for wondering if this was somehow by design.
It most definitely wasn't, and as programmer on-call, it fell to Andrew to work out why a bunch of pensioners had dropped off the face of the Earth as far as the council was concerned.
With the ticket for investigation raised, he duly began sleuthing. It was certainly a strange one – the records were present and correct, with names, addresses, and personal details.
As he looked at the list of those that were being missed, he noticed a common factor. All those affected were well past the pensionable age. A long, long way past.
He looked again at the system. Either the IBM was able to grant eternal youth ("under 18-year-olds were not allowed housing benefit," he explained) or something had gone very wrong with the age calculation.
Perhaps mindful of memory constraints or maybe just out of sheer wanton muppetry, somebody had decided to store the date of birth with only two digits for the year.
The result had been an impromptu axing of benefits for the elderly residents of the community.
Andrew applied a fix, and restored benefits to those who had lost them, most likely reducing his chance of a peerage in the process.
In fact, it got a bit worse for the bean-counters concerned. The fix, according to Andrew, meant that "some pensioners that had been refused on the original applications because they were over 100... were also now eligible and were brought onto housing benefit."
Clearly nobody had thought to pick up the On Call phone when faced with a form filled out by a centenarian. Andrew, on the other hand: the IT world's Robin Hood (with RPGII and Filetab skills replacing the bow and arrow).
[6]
Tell us about your own run-ins with date formatting, or that time you did a simple fix and undid millions of pounds of savings. All it takes is an email to [7]On Call to share your story. ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/Tag/on-call
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YBPq0ooFCqb4DNdAdbS@2AAAAAo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/mainframe/mainframe_PP4341.html
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YBPq0ooFCqb4DNdAdbS@2AAAAAo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/22/on_call/
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Yes it's a good job lessons were learned and we didn't have the same problem 20 years later. That would be embarrassing.
As they said in the 80s...
Benefits are the Governmental version of the bully who steals your lunch money. Usually going to the same people.
Re: As they said in the 80s...
Come on AC, are you really opining that people with serious illnesses and disabilities are bullies who are stealing money off you?
Injury and illness can happen to anybody, and most people who claim from the national insurance scheme have paid into it for years.
Re: As they said in the 80s...
Benefits are the Governmental version of the bully who steals your lunch money.
Hmmm ...
I spent a good while trying my very best to see if I could come up with another suitable definition for this particular AC.
But no.
So total arsehole it is.
O.
Language!
Pronounced "Pee-El-Wun" but properly written PL/I, I believe. One of those languages that I only ever read the primer textbook, but never had a machine to run a program on.
Re: Language!
To aficionados it was pronounced Pee-El-Eye.
Re: Language!
Yes, I remember my old man pronouncing it like that. Reading the story I was wondering if there was some other similarly monikered language around in the late seventies.
Re: Language!
The I was the Roman numeral. They figured there would be a II, III, IV etc.
IBM pronounces it Pee El One.
Can you change your date of birth?
One of my bosses told me that his date of birth was mis-recorded in the corporate HR database 06/071950 instead of 06/06/1950. As your data of birth does not change, there was no support in the application to change it. He said it didnt really matter - it just pushed his retirement date out by 1 month.
There was a different database which was used by people all over the world. If you pressed help for a date field, it gave you an example "02/03/2004". Is this 02/March or 03/Feb? 01/26/2004 would have been cleared.
Re: Can you change your date of birth?
Ah yes, that sweet January, Mar, February calendar that we all know and love
Re: Can you change your date of birth?
Can you change your date of birth?
I'm sure my wife's been doing that for years...
Freedos
has a Pl/1 version available IIRC and there are some seriously good resources on the internet thingy these days. I remember trying to learn it from a shitty old a5 manual with that smell of old computer manuals. Now you can get youtube videos! I may have to make sure I watch them in B&W!
Re: Freedos
Or 40 column green screen, sticky from cigarette smoke for true nostalgia
Timing
[1]Not a good day to be calling him Robin Hood.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/28/robinhood_blocks_trades/
Re: Timing
It's all good, everybody knows that the US completely turns any British story around to fit their needs :-)
Re: Timing
Dennis Moore, Dennis Moore, Galloping through the sward
Dennis Moore, Dennis Moore, And his horse concorde
He steals from the rich, And gives to the poor, Mr Moore, Mr Moore, Mr Moore
--
Dennis Moore, Dennis Moore, Dum dum dum the night
Dennis Moore, Dennis Moore, Dum de dum dum plight
He steals dum dum dum, And dum dum dum dee, Dennis dum, Dennis dee, Dum dum dum
--
Dennis Moore, Dennis Moore, Riding through the land
Dennis Moore, Dennis Moore, Without a merry band
He steals from the poor, And gives to the rich, Stupid Bitch.
"Blimey, this redistribution of wealth is trickier than I thought."
Our company wrote a system for a large housing association that produced gift cards for tennants who had kept up with their rents throughout the year. They sent us Excel spreadsheets with the tennant detains - name, address etc and the amount to be paid and we created prepaid gift cards loaded with the said amount and mailed them out to the recipients.
When I was doing some testing prior to the live production of the cards, I was scanning through a list of recipients and noticed people with names like "Mr John Smith - DECEASED" and "Mrs Mary Jones - DECEASED". They had no way on their system of marking tennants who had died, so just tagged the text to their surnames and later exported the data to us!
I pointed out to the clients that some people might be upset to receive letters addressed to their dead loved ones, plus the fact that dead people don't tend to use gift cards. There were some red faces, but I did receive thanks for saving them both embarrasment and money.
I had a Y2K bugged program
Back in the mid 90's I wrote a bulk delete program for a company I was consulting with. You could delete anything older than a certain date as one of the options.
I left them in the late 90's. As Y2K came around I just did a quick check. Big oops. Yes, 2 date formatting was rife in it. So, an emergency call to the company IT manager (who was new and didn't know me) to ask him to please delete the program quickly as it could have unintended consequences....
Shortly after that, the company went into financial troubles. I assume it wasn't my fault
Alan
2^16
I suspect that the memory chips actually had 1536 more bits than stated!
"64,000 bits of information."
Ahh, a 1900s-style "millennium bug", a nice little twist there!