Kent bloke buried under 3,000 congestion charge receipts

A Kent tradesman who ill-advisedly decided to pay the London congestion charge online was buried by a 3,000-receipt tsunami for his trouble, the BBC reports. Swanley geezer Graeme Ellis hit the Transport for London online presence to cough the £8 fee and then asked for some evidence of payment. Shortly thereafter, the postie …

[Steve Kellett]

I love these...

Back in '95 I received an automatically generated summons for non-payment of Council Tax from Derbyshire County Council (or whatever it and they were called at the time). It clearly stated that I owed them something like -0.23 pounds. Yes, I'd mis-read the amount due and over paid them by 23 pence. Their badly-written Council Tax system had then duly hit a dealine and churned out who knows how many summons for anyone who had a non-zero balance.

The person who answered the phone when I rang up to say "WTF?" sounded extremely bored with the whole thing. There must have been thousands of us.

[JP]

Crapita strikes again!

Does anyone actually know of a good service they provide?

Paris, because she would have probably been happy to build castles and towers...

[Terry Bernstein]

A slight mistake somewhere then..

Didn't anyone notice this and think it a bit strange?

Postman Pat would never have delivered that lot.

[TeeCee]

They've identified the fault?

So have I.

"Our service provider, Capita......"

There's yer problem, right there. They ain't know as "Crapita" for nothing. The only mystery here is why Government departments at all levels persist in hiring them, despite repeated proof that they couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery.

[Andy ORourke]

Clearly the TFL BOFH at work

"Oh, so you want proof of payment do you........"

[Sceptical Bastard]

Oh, THEM - I might have known

Quote: "Our service provider, Capita..."

Crapita, huh? Well, that explains a lot - see Private Eye magazine passim for story after story of this company's cock-ups. They are to government and local authority services what EDS is to government IT projects.

And, 'ere, Lester - what's wiv all dis 'geezer' blokeiness, like? Not everyone in Kent sahnds like Del Boy, kno' wor' I mean?

[Turv]

Crapita

We ditched them in our own Local Authority years ago due to incredible incompetence

[Anonymous Coward]

Money well spent...

3000 items at 22p per item (second class discount rate) £660

Money well spent Ken!

[Chris Miller]

Save the rain forest!

Fun article - anything that portrays Crapita in their true colours can't be bad.

<PEDANT>

There may be a few readers of ElReg who are still labouring under the delusion that by not printing out their emails they are somehow helping to save the rain forest. Even ignoring recycling, the wood pulp used to make paper comes almost entirely from North American and Northern European pine forests. They are a renewable resource, just like a grain crop (except they take a few decades to grow rather than a single season).

If you want to save the rain forest, avoid driving using biofuels, which are often grown on the site of newly-felled rainforest - oh, hang on, thanks to that nice Mr Darling we can't avoid this any more, can we?

</PEDANT>

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn Damn Damn

I was so hoping it was K*nt Ertugral..

[Sceptical Bastard]

@ Money well spent

Well, at least they're doing their bit to save the Post Office

[Rob]

Barclaycard are the same

When I closed my Barclaycard about 2 years ago I paid off what I thought was the final balance. I then got my 'last' statement saying I still owed them 53 pence. I went into the bank and spoke to them and after having a chuckle with the account manager handed them 53p in CASH (no cheques here matey!). Then she asked me for the cards which I handed to her in bits as i'd already cut them up. She said thankyou very much and that will be the end of it. It's now 2 years later and every three months I get a paper statement through the door from Barclaycard telling me that they owe me 53p. FFS. Forget about it - I'm not bothered, really. Just stop destroying the forests in order to tell me of your ineptitude. :/

[dervheid]

All he needs to do now...

is convert his heating to run on "biomass", and keep asking TfL for reciepts. Should be able to save the planet that way!

[Mark Wills]

Fucking programmers eh?

for(i=0;i<3000;i++) issue_bill(); /* fuck it, 3000 should do */

[Anonymous Coward]

@Save the rain forest!

"The wood pulp used to make paper comes almost entirely from North American and Northern European pine forests"

Including the forest that surrounds the village where I live, which creates local jobs and (in theory) keeps our local taxes down.

Keep printing those receipts, Ken!

[Anonymous Coward]

tFl,

thats got to be the first time i've ever heard a tfK representative not blame the 'customer' somehow, ken must be up for election

[Nick]

Re: A slight mistake somewhere then..

Terry Bernstein wrote:

"Didn't anyone notice this and think it a bit strange?"

They'll be printed by machine and not seen by a human. 3000 is probably just a blip in terms of the total numbers sent.

The postman probably did but they have a legal responsibility to deliver them. Once it's in their system they can't stop it.

[Dunstan Vavasour]

Systems versus judgement

This comes back to one of my pet peeves: that putting "systems" in place stops people using judgement. Instead of asking "is this person a pervert who'll interfere with the children?", or "I think we want to keep half an eye on X, don't you?" we have progressed to "All the system checks are OK, so we're covered".

Or, put another way, "Computer says no".

[Anonymous Coward]

They've identified the fault (2)...

As the bored operative who, having got fed up with pressing "Ok" on the print dialog box for the millionth time that morning decided to change the no of copies from 1 to 3000 "for a laugh"

Heart 'cos I can sympathise with that kind of job

[IT MUNKEY]

the problem is The guy........

The guy( beardy one) who owns or runs crapita wears white jeans. Say no more.

I know this cause i shared an elevator with him in London once while i was going to the HO to be fired, for refusing to drive car that i didnt need as i lived next door to my job.

[Law]

RE: the problem is The guy........

"i was going to the HO to be fired, for refusing to drive car that i didnt need as i lived next door to my job."

You dared not waste tax payers money?! Crazy fool - your fired!!! lol...

[Bob Gender]

Computer says no

"This comes back to one of my pet peeves: that putting "systems" in place stops people using judgement. Instead of asking "is this person a pervert who'll interfere with the children?", or "I think we want to keep half an eye on X, don't you?" we have progressed to "All the system checks are OK, so we're covered"."

My favourite is credit scoring, whereby the bank that holds my loan can refuse to extend the loan because I don't meet their criteria - despite the fact the monthly payments (never missed) would remain the same and I earn twice what I did when I took the loan out (and for a FTSE 100 company rather than for a sole trader).

I, for one, look forward to welcoming our Skynet system overlords. At least I can run around with laser cannons shooting them then.

Mine's the DJ.

[Paul]

LOL

"i was going to the HO to be fired, for refusing to drive car that i didnt need as i lived next door to my job."

That says it all, really. What next, using taxpayers' money to buy up every Peel P50 in existence and issue them to workers so they can drive straight to their desks?

[OpenSorce Phreak]

I haven't laughed that hard in a long time!

Wow I needed that laugh today... I quit the nicotine and I was hurting...

I can just imagine the "envelope sealer" guy at Capita staring at the 8th reem of paper needed for the reciepts and assuming that the client really did requested 3500 reciepts...

Envelope sealer guy: "Ummm... boss...?"

PHB: "What is it PFY?"

Envelope sealer guy: "Eh, nevermind"

[Anonymous Coward]

Capita

I thought they'd been sacked.

Challenge: Name a company with a stupid nonsense-but-modern-sounding-almost-a-word name, dreamt up by a marketing person, that is actually any good.

OK, it doesn't really relate to this thread, but hey! I might need to employ one some time!

Oh, and any company with an -ing slogan is not allowed, even if they are good. Unless its honest like "screwing your money out of your pocket"

[John Chopper]

Walking out of the room with my coat on saying....

So I guess you could say all Capita are guilty of is "Pushing the Envelope" (well 3000 of them).

[Blakkers]

and Terminal 5

Great country drowning in it's own ineptitude.

I blame it on the smoking ban.

Take care,

Blakkers

[Anonymous Coward]

The government love Capita

...no-one knows why. We've put in good bids for government contracts that have ended up going to Capita, who are just a deceitful bunch of cowboys. Presumably someone's getting backhanders somewhere...

[Dr Patrick J R Harkin]

I think I know what happened...

God I'm bored.

Bored bored bored.

I wonder how many receipts that printer can do from one roll.

I could count them.

That would be boring.

Hang on, if I send an entire rolls-worth to some poor schmuck then HE'LL count them and tell the press. Sweet!

Now if I just inject this extra line of Postscript into the print queue and wait...

[Anonymous Coward]

Challenge: Empty the paper warehouse

"Now if I just inject this extra line of Postscript"

and send the lot to a PCL printer.

That should use up 30,000,000 sheets, at least!