HE weather here has cooled down considerably, so I am back to drinking hot coffee and researching for upcoming articles.

This coming week I’ll stay indoors more; I expect writing capacity will hence increase.

y webhost since 2003 is having issues with bots, but it has blocked Tor instead. We’re working to undo this.

If raw Web stats are to be believed, the main domain (not subdomains) of schestowitz.com got a million visitors last month. AWStats isn’t good enough at classifying bots, so this is overly flattering and… just false.

The state of the Web (noise as traffic, humans being a minority of the whole) is truly worrying. It wasn’t like this in 2003.

I am really not happy with the direction the Internet has taken.

Incoming:

believe that of all months, at least here in the UK, August is the hottest (I could check to be sure). This year heatwaves began in May and even in April we had some hot days.

This is global warming. Maybe it’s “fun in the sun” sometimes, but what about the impact on agriculture, the price of water, and the safety of animals?

August in the UK seems like Spain several decades ago.

nshittification is not a term that I used, but here it is for everyone to see:

Some time ago I wrote to you regarding a cyber issue. I appreciated your response and it seems like you took my input seriously and changed accordingly so as to alleviate concerns about online scams and communication over E-mail.

Today I want to give some input regarding your branch at Manchester City Centre (Market Street).

In a nutshell, my wife and I had a 9:30 appointment and spoke to an employee whom we liked and has been very helpful to us in the past. We appreciated how she solved an issue and even communicated with us several time, by landline, to ensure the issue had been solved.

Today it seems like when handling us she was being supervised from the desk to us (accompanied from afar), where a person we assume to be her manager eavesdropped on our communication and threw mildly demeaning remarks our way (if not microaggression, definitely micro-managing the lady who served us, based on our intuition). The lady we sat with wanted to offer the services that we scheduled the meeting for, however this was interrupted by the other lady, who insisted we needed to do it using an “app” (which we don’t have) on our own. It was rather unpleasant, probably not only for us but also for the lady who served us.

After this appointment my wife and I spent some hours discussing this matter in a coffee shop down the road and decided to write to you about it. We want to be heard and we amicably ask for our input to be humbly considered. We write with good intentions, no bad faith here.

To keep this tidy, I wanted to take this opportunity to raise a number of pertinent concerns only partly related to this appointment (some are more general). The appointment started OK, but ended with some disappointment, not appointment per se.

1. Online Pressure and Discrimination Against ‘Offline’ Banking

When online banking was phased it more than 2 decades ago we were assured it would mostly enhance services rather than exclude or discriminate against people (e.g. things exclusive to some customers, not available to those who don’t opt in; some cannot feasibly opt in, see point (3) below).

My wife and I are both Computer Scientists and prefer for banking to be done in person. We know why. We know how computers work. Herding clients into “apps” and Web sites is not only unsafe; it’s also a risk. It is possible that things will not be done correctly, then blamed on the customers. Instead of saving time it might end up costing the customers a great deal of time, even distress.

2. In-Branch Services

We were told that there is guarantee of access to a branch, however the branch where we both opened out accounts more than a decade ago literally became a casino (the branch got closed, only to be replaced by a gambling shop near Piccadilly Station) and it looks like senior staff – i.e. people who know us and vice versa – was removed over time, only to be replace by much younger people who are less experienced and very dependent on colleagues. That slowed things done. Things that can (or could) take just 5 minutes would take up to an hour, sometimes even longer.

It moreover seems like every year more things become “online-only”, thus we are led to assume the end goal is for the bank to just become some “app” and Web site with no physical presences, no staff to approach, and no collaterals or assets with which to back savings. This seems like a risky gambit and a worrying trajectory that does not inspire confidence.

With banking, it all boils down to trust and confidence. People need to sense that they can confidently withdraw their money. They need to feel like the money is in safe hands.

3. Accessibility

For the sake of people with disability/ies (all of us are likely to become at least partly disabled at one point our our lives) it is crucial to maintain in-person services and imperative that assurances to this effect are given. Contrary to this, the impression given to us today is that such a commitment is gradually being phased out and banking with a human touch (as such) will be only temporarily available, leaving clients grappling to face persons who are qualified and familiar with the particular processes.

Please, can you investigate and clarify these matters? Our aim is not to belittle or insult anybody; we just try to do our best to improve the service or the perceived customer experience. We felt like we witnessed today competing interests: the profit motive against the clients’ genuine interest.

4. Customer-First Approach

In 2000 I was already a very early adopter of online banking, but now I partly regret what became of it; it seems to be means of outsourcing labour from bank staff to the clients, both at the expense of staff and clients and at risk (accountability) to staff and clients, for neither stands to benefit from this role-passing, i.e. it’s detrimental to us all, even your own staff, whose future seems increasingly uncertain. There is no lack of manpower (there are many people out there eager to find a job), there is just a race to the bottom in terms of filling up positions (or simply deprecating them altogether).

HAVE just returned home, feeling both satisfied and upset. I basically just got back from sun-soaking trip, saved about 70 pounds, but the annoying thing is, I spent a lot of time reporting injustice and there was a corporate effort to cover up the injustice instead of tackling this injustice.

Let me explain.

Today at the till I was served by the same lady whom I reported before, after she had stolen one pound from me (in change) THREE TIMES IN A ROW…

Not kidding.

I’ve been trying to avoid her since then and when reporting her I said the goal wasn’t to get her sacked but to stop the stealing (it’s impossible to get such basic maths wrong “by accident” three times in a row).

Today I could not avoid her. She just sat in place of a colleague when I was in a queue (taking a colleague’s seat)… and did it to me ONCE AGAIN the same short-changing (one pound; same as always) along with the same excuse, so again I had to wait there for a boss to “correct” the mistake, then stood there at Customer Service to report the person (who already did this to me and is still there… and still up to the same old things). My assumption is that she can short-change (one pound) about 10 people per shift and then pocket a tenner without the register detecting an anomaly. Maybe she tips herself (bonus) that way… but at whose expense and at what cost to the reputation of the business, the time/patience/composure of the customers and so on?

But wait, it gets worse.

At first Customer Service turned down my request to report this worker or their stealing, in effect covering up for her. They decided to say all the managers were “at the/a meeting” (which I doubted, it’s just a classic excuse and that shop has about 10 managers on duty). I persisted, persevered, and only after (several other) further arguments they magically found a manager who could come out and pick the report. He seemed a little junior for a manager, but let’s not be too judgemental of appearances. They then made an excuse for why a manager becomes available when the issue becomes more of a nuisance or a risk. Why lie to the customer? Never lie to the customers. Whether the customer is “always right” or not, do not lie.

This is really awful and I said that if they have staff stealing from the shop, that’s one thing, but don’t steal from the customers. Pay them better perhaps; one man next to me at the till had a good joke about how “they need to make money”. He didn’t doubt this was intentional; it kept happening. It will probably keep happening unless I can avoid this cashier every time in the future. But what about other people? They might think it’s an accident or not even notice.

Businesses being apathetic to staff that steals is a very big problem. I’ve already spent about an hour (all combined) dealing with and reporting this issue. They don’t compensate me for the time and trouble; heck, it doesn’t seem like they even do anything with my reports, so what’s the point reporting it to them? Maybe even an external entity would treat this issue as too “low-value” to merit proper investigations. This means people can get away with a lot of cheating (or petty thieving) as long as it’s not “big enough”.

In hindsight, it was always hard to get a hold of a boss to report these issues too. It was slow, cumbersome, almost impossible – maybe by design. Maybe Customer Service people even get trained in stonewalling people.

The world is becoming a cruel place, not just to staff but also to customers.

N 2019, in Week 29 to be specific, 9,080 people died in England and Wales. That was similar to prior years because the 2014-2019 average for that week was 9,100. 5 years have passed since then. Half a decade! Yup, and now, for the same week, we have 10,182 in the same demography (data released yesterday). The population grew only 1-2% since then, but deaths increased by about 12%

Labour Party, please investigate!

The UK riots killed almost nobody. If the experimental vaccine has caused the deaths of more than 1,000 people per week (until now!), then we must know. Knowing if the first step towards accountability.

want to combine two issues in this post, based on two very recent anecdotes.

I’ve just checked bank accounts (it’s taking a long time because the login processes have become super-cumbersome), having already phoned BT several times, and the issue remained unsolved for several months. It was starting to seem like it’s intentional, a pattern, not some accident. It’s hard to imagine how you get it wrong three times in a row, but then again all services getting worse seems like the “new normal” and “enshittification” was coined to describe this phenomenon.

The other day I told the energy supplier to quit spamming me about spymeters (they nagged me about it over 100 times over the years) and after they said they’d stop they merely started doing it every single day, i.e. it got even worse. The spam comes through the box (physical), inbox, and sometimes even phonecalls.

We need to demand change, not learn to accept this degradation of services.