Other What's ruining your life right now?

My Halifax seems fine so they must have fixed it.

 

I used to work for the four-lettered bank some years ago, and they had the whizz-bang front-ends for the basic stuff, but for anything useful you had to dive into terminal-based systems.

 

These old legacy systems might be ancient and they might be creaking at the seams a little bit, but in the greater scheme of things they are actually remarkably robust given the sheer volume of work they do and the relatively limited downtime they suffer (today's outage excepted, of course). The argument for ripping them up and starting again tends to be somewhat of a non-starter because swapping an old but relatively reliable, and utterly business-critical, system for a new one of unknown reliability isn't hugely appealing. You're trading old, known bugs and flaws for a whole set of new, unknown ones...

I used to work for a life assurer and their backend systems were mainframes that ran on COBOL and FORTRAN and processed a staggering volume of work in overnight batch runs. Genuinely bonkers how many transactions got processed with zero errors and very, very minimal downtime. I can only imagine that high-street banks are processing several orders of magnitude more in terms of the volume of transactions.

 

This is true, but the other side of that coin is when things go wrong. When this stuff goes wrong it goes very wrong, and without the expertise available it can be very hard - and very expensive - to fix. There’s always a big risk to core banking services whenever these systems have to be changed or updated.

I can’t find the links now, but the last time TSB tried to fully sever itself from Lloyds, their customers were left without banking facilities for days. Not just the online banking or apps, normal bank transactions were not processed properly or on time… or at all…

 

Of course all the highly skilled local IT experts who know these critical systems inside out and have run them for many years haven't been made redundant and been replaced by cheap offshore slave labour who move companies every six months...

...oh, wait...

 

Yeah as @Gareth Halfacree says, the issue isn't that the guys who know this stuff were made redundant, it's that they are generally old enough now to have retired, if they're still with us full stop.

 

Blimey those languages are a blast from the past, I spent my work experience 35yrs ago translating software that simulated stress fractures on Jet engines between one and the other, fun times going through pages and pages of code... mad that companies still use them.

 

Ringpull cans, bloody useless tat for lazy gits. What's worse are the modern ones with daft bases, you can't even turn them upside down and put a can opener on them any more.

"It saves you turning a handle for ten seconds!"

Yeah great, think how this will transform my life. In the meantime I've now got a razor edge to contend with and a lip that stops the food coming out.

 

Grrr, break out the Swiss Army Knife can opener. No, did it get one of the 3 axes!

 

Very much the epitome of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". It's genuinely mindboggling the volume and value of transactions that get conducted by systems running COBOL.

 

I've done that before now. A Swiss Army Knife is the most important tool you can have. I have 2, 1 of which is more than 40 years old.

 

They save me ten minutes of rootling around the utensil drawer trying to find the tin opener, and then another ten minutes to find the other one because I can't get on with one of the 2 we have, long live ring pulls.

 

Our can opener died a few years ago and i started using a Swiss Army knife as a stop-gap thing. Still not bought a new can opener, just about as fast with the SAK now.

 

For the random cans that don't have pulls on them I've found a hammer and flathead screwdriver can do the trick.

 

That was the accepted way to open cans for almost 50 years before the invention of the can opener.

 

Rude.

 

Not ruining, but more food for thought stuff.

My wife left this morning for a business trip. I started working at 6:45 in the morning, sent my last email at 7:50 at night. I'm happy and relaxed because I got stuff done, but without my wife kicking my butt, I seem to fall into an old habit of mine: very long hours. I had a 20 minute lunch break.

Maybe I should control my working hours better, especially when on my own.

 

Sometimes it's good to get in a good day of work and feel like you've gotten a lot done, but only once in a while. If it becomes habit then you quickly start to resent your work no matter how much you "enjoy" it. I guess I'm preaching to the choir but it's always good to be reminded we are not on this planet solely to create shareholder value.