Author: Aden Davies

Art & Money – Site Sessions Talk – May 2017

This is a write up of a short talk I gave in May 2017 as part of Leila Johnston’s Site Sessions events. This is what I wanted to say but not sure if I actually did or not (until the video surfaces that is).

**********************

Hello. My name is Aden and the title of my talk is not ‘make art note’ but I was in Amsterdam last week and this old warehouse was outside my hotel and it seemed fitting. My talk is actually called make banks open. I am going to talk to you today about banking regulation (sorry I will try and make it fun)…and hopefully how it will unleash art on the world of finance.

 

A little bit about me, I worked at HSBC for over 17 years i.e. 6258 days in total. I worked in a variety of technical roles and latterly in the innovation function (no sniggering HSBC customers) trying to make the bank better. I largely failed. But I still work in the industry but I am freelance now. I have unfinished business with banks.

 

I want to talk about 3 things in the next 10 minutes. How regulations are forcing the banks to be more open. How those changes are leading a lot of companies to believe they can solve the problems of our financial lives. And finally, thankfully a little bit about how these changes will let the art into banking, I hope.

 

In 2008 banks fucked the world. Over extended credit on massively complex and opaque financial instruments such a credit default swaps and mortgage backed securities brought the whole house of cards crashing down. Leading to massive government bailouts of the banks that were deemed systemically important to the worlds continued operation. This brought about mass austerity and can be blamed for a lot of societies ills today.

 

This crisis also fucked the banks, less so for certain but still caused them a lot of pain. Historically low interest rates rendered a lot of their old business models almost useless and they made enemies in very powerful places. The governments and the regulators. This should not have been possible and it should never happen again. A raft of huge regulatory programs were unleashed…

 

Now you may think this was too little too late….and you may be right but the changes that have been put in place have largely been about protecting consumers from the casino like attitudes of large banks, betting the house on fallacies. These regulations came in many shapes and size and with many weird names…two of the largest were…

 

Dodd-Frank a set of measures aimed at US banks (the ones that largely caused the disaster) to improve the transparency of the banks especially with regards to products like derivatives.

This also introduced the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency designed to protect consumers from banks treating them unfairly….

This set of measures is currently under attack from the Tangerine Despot who hates its figure head Elizabeth Warren, the scourge of banks in the US. This is a disaster that will hopefully not come to pass.

 

The other large global set of measures are Basel III. These measures mean that banks have to hold a far higher percentage of actual liquid capital i.e. real money to avoid them over extending themselves again. Also a series of stress tests are undertaken at regular intervals to test the strength of banks all over the world to try and simulate similar crises to test their resilience now.

 

There is a new set of regulation that is coming to our shores soon. It is an EU wide piece of legislation AND I AM VERY EXCITED ABOUT IT.

….are you ready for this?

 

Boom. The Payments Service Directive 2: The revenge. Or PSD2 as it is more commonly known. It is, in my humble opinion, going to change the face of banking to a greater extent than anything I have seen in my adult lifetime (most of which has been spent working for banks).

 

Well my dear….let me tell you how and why it is so exciting.

 

There are a whole host of measures contained within the page turner of a document. Ultimately the ones that will impact us most are the following.

This set of regulations is an attack on the middle men of payments. Predominantly the big ones. Visa, Amex and Mastercard. When was the last time you did not buy anything without using those? This will introduce measures that will open up payments.

This will be achieved by the introduction of the snappily titled Payment Initiation Services and Account Information Services. New regulated entities that will be allowed to put in and take out money from your bank accounts directly in the case of the PIS. And for the AIS the ability to receive your transaction and balance data automatically in near real time.

And that is very exciting because it enables a lot of very interesting things to become reality.

 

Open Banking UK – doing great work to ensure the slow bureaucracy of Europe is not hampered by inertia, or lobbying from those affected etc. This is a shift that is happening across the world. Canada, Singapore, Australia and the US are all starting their own open banking programs and the tide is not going back out….

(Since I gave this talk the API specifications have now been published https://www.openbanking.org.uk/read-write-apis/)

 

These functions form around 90% of day to day banking functions for most people

If new regulated companies have access to these services they can be pseudo or neo banks and that means we should see some real innovation in the space which has been sorely lacking.

PSD2 is signed into European Law on the 12th of January 2018. The technical measures included need to be in place within 18 months of that law being in place. Which is a long time to wait but thankfully the Competition Markets Authority in the UK has stepped in and put some tighter timescales in place around the data part of these requirements. The first banking APIs for transaction data in the UK must be live by January next year…or else.

 

So the pipes are opening….what comes next? Efficiency dreams.

 

 

Throughout history the organisation of your finances has made people about as a happy as these two.  I am sure you have all been in similar situations where one person in the relationship weighs your money, while the other partner stares into space wishing they were dead. It is a dull affair for the majority of us. Either a chore of indifference or something that we blissfully ignore.

The Money Changer And His Wife by German painter Ludwing Von Langenmantel

 

 

There are some that love it of course. Accountants, Spreadsheet nerds, organised people that will pour over their finances and models for hours. Planning everything to the nth degree. You know, sociopaths.   For most that is out of reach both skill wise and desire wise. The stereotype I would like to lean on is that creative people are less organised / bothered by money? Anyway I hate managing money and I wish I was a spreadsheet nerd.

 

This is not helped by most internet banking interfaces. They may as well be bank statements sellotaped to a monitor for the purposes of making a point in presentations. This statement is from 2013. Nothing has really changed.

 

Little has improved since the desktop apps of the 90s that took money management to a fine art of budgets, bar graphs and pie charts. Their are lots of people who remember these so fondly.

 

Some banks have attempted to introduce money management features to banking. In the industry these are called PFM (Personal Financial Management). Does it really help you manage your money? Kind of I guess. Does it make you feel anything at all? Meh.

 

There are people that might be thinking but I have an app and it is perfectly acceptable. And I am sure it is lovely in a perfunctory kind of way. Most people have not seen what good really looks like.

 

In retail banking startups like Monzo are eyeing up current accounts and thinking they can build something better…something more loveable both from a using and viewing your money point of view but also as a compnay. Something that they describe as ‘the bank of the future’

 

And there are many, many others who are excited about being the bank of the future and what PSD2 brings to them as they can build better products, more quickly than the tardy old incumbent banks. So they see PSD2 as the second coming. They are right to think like that.

 

The perceived path of all this is to beautiful place where we all have our own AI powered financial advisor. A digital private banker for the masses running our financial lives perfectly and removing all worry. That is the utopian dream of financial services…as a technologist I am intrigued as to how this utilitarian dream plays out…

 

But…it all feels a bit boring. More regulated industries making solutions they think fit in with what the mythical person of today (largely millennials) want from finance. That we want to be organised and efficient and that is the goal. It bores the arse off me.

 

What is not clear in these regulatory measures is can I have access to my own data to build my own things? In the UK it looks like this will be available for data. And this gives us some more interesting possibilities. If you can code then you can make. You can solve your own problems. Make niche solutions only you would use…but others may find useful. This has long been the source of real innovation.

 

And this is where I see real opportunities to let the art in. Because I don’t just want VC funded white men building the banks of the future. While they may well be perfectly designed to improve my white metropolitan elite life and reduce my flat white intake to save me money I want more…

 

Artistry in banking is largely limited to the notes we use. As I am sure you are all aware this is the bank note of the year for 2016. I will be honest I find it quite ugly and confusing.

 

This years hot favourite however is beautiful. I mean look at it. I want more if this but applied to the digital interfaces of money. And for that we need more artists.

 

 

I want interfaces designed by people like Stef and Giorgia. For 52 weeks in 2015 they set themselves a data recording challenge and then posted the results to each other. Their brilliant hand designed visualisation posted across the world every week a few years back are inspirational in many ways. A great book and now permanently installed at MoMA in new York.  What would banking services made by Stef and Giorgia look like?

 

What would Sheffields Own Universal Everything think finance should look like via their imagined new screens and interfaces? I don’t know but it would be nice.

You can see more of their work on this project at https://www.instagram.com/p/BTbfnz-Fq0I/ and https://vimeo.com/215164746

 

 

How about Manchester based artist Brendan Dawes with his algorithmic art. This is a piece of work he created last year in conjunction with dutch payments company Adyen to visualise payments

‘With this piece I asked myself what if you could peer inside this system and see payments being added to the network. Rather than create some kind of representation of networks I instead wanted to create a world where these delicate moments seemed to float down into the network and suggest they are almost delicate in nature. Each representation is constructed from various parts of the data — the shape is born from the transaction category / vertical whilst the texture is derived from the type of device that was used. The colour is then informed by where in the world the payment took place’ Lovely.

 

How about local pirates and purveyors of fine gadgetry pimoroni? What would they make from the mixture of transaction data and payment ability with their marvellous machines? The physical to digital and back to physical has not really been experimented with in financial services. I think this is a rich seam of wonder.

 

As James just said about his shop Makers, there are many ludicrously specific economies out there and I am hoping that the PSD2 regulations opening up access to more varied companies and individuals will lead to some ludicrously specific solutions that might be built for the few but actually end up being beneficial to the many….not in a Tory way obviously.

 

 

One piece of work from a few years ago that really stuck in my head was Heidi Hinders Money No Object. Heidi researched new ways to make museum donations more interactive. This image shows the handshake agreement, RFIDs contactless payment methods built into the gloves, there is also a hive five interaction, a tap dance payment where the payment method is built into shoes.

Using RFID to bring physical interactions to payments…here is the hug and pay. Bringing different gestures and human contact to payment.

You can watch a short documentary about the project there is also more written about it over here

and returning to currency this was also by Heidi…she took everyday coins and left them in petri dishes to see what delightful bacteria formed. A vice versa of where there is muck there is brass…either way I find it quite beautiful

 

This is what I want to see a lot more of. I want more poeple like those mentioned above building things to do with money. Thanks to the regulations forcing banks open and releasing new data and materials into the world to make with hopefully they can.

 

I will end with this quote from John Maeda on design and art. I want better and different questions than the ones currently being asked by banks of fintech firms. I want to see something truly different and I have a feeling art and artists have an important role to play in that. Thanks.

.

July 9, 2017 Add Comment

Casino Royale (2006)

The classic digital money transfer suitcase. Alphanumeric keypad. Password intrigue. Comedy Swiss Banker. Awful dialogue. Suggested by Scott Smith

May 7, 2017 Add Comment

Easyjet Expense Claim Clusterfuck

When a company fails to provide the service it has sold then there has to be recompense. There has to be resolution for the customer. There has to be a finality to the issue. This is a story of how Easyjet has failed miserably on all fronts.

This long post is my tale of woe so I have a record of this mess and that it may help with the resolution of this problem. I expect very few to read it but I hope that at least one employee of Easyjet does so, maybe their CEO, Dame Carolyn McCall or their Director of Communications Paul Moore.

This ripping yarn also tells of how a company makes life hard for itself with some basic communication failures, poor systems, dis-empowered staff, departmental silos and all round incompetence. Whether this is by design or by accident depends on your world view. I will be optimistic and imagine it is incompetence by accident rather than willful incompetence in the hope that people give up chasing what Easyjet owe.

Some people will read this and say why did he not take them to small claims court or use a service like resolver or write a letter to the CEO, the answer is it felt like harder / unknown work. In hindsight I should have pursued other avenues but here we are.

 

The weekend away

On March the 18th 2016 my good lady wife and I flew to Bilbao on our way to San Sebastian for the weekend for my pre 40th birthday treat. It was a great weekend, sampling the local food and drink, seeing the sights, consuming cultural delights and rubbing shoulders with the stars etc. etc. a great weekend was had.

 

The cancelled flight

The problems came when it was time to go home. We received a notification via the Easyjet app on Sunday morning warning of delays due to the French Air Traffic Controllers Strike. I was impressed they warned us and slightly worried. We did not fly out until much later that evening, around 21.30. Upon arrival at the airport our flight was delayed around 30 mins, we had arrived quite early as we feared the worst. This soon escalated, the delay was over two hours and things were not looking good. the flight was finally cancelled at around 8pm (If memory serves me / my tweet timestamps are good).

Then it began. A garbled announcement. Confusion in the airport. Mass exodus to a service desk. There then followed a period of around three hours queuing for us and we were relatively near the front. It was never really made clear what we were actually queuing for as there was zero communication with the queue, no one walking the line, no announcements of any note. Rumours circulated, angered passengers multiplied, the desk was overwhelmed. They made a real pigs ear of the communication to the queue. We were at the half way point when it started. Further back there were families with small children. I was unaware at the time but this communication ineptitude was a portent of things to come.

We were hoping that we were queuing for over night accommodation and to be booked on the next flight back to Manchester. Downside being was that the next flight back to Manchester was not until Friday. We used the Easyjet app to look at available alternatives. There was a flight to Stansted the following evening which we booked ourselves onto.

We continued to queue for accommodation and when we finally made it to the desk we were told there were no other flights home. Nothing from nearby alternatives like Santander either until Wednesday at the earliest. Our two children were being looked after by my parents thankfully. My wife was due in work Tuesday and I had job interviews in London that day too. They put us up in a hotel in Bilbao, we got on a coach and after a short wait were ferried to the hotel. Quite a nice hotel too.

Our flight to Stansted was was around 9 the following evening. This meant we had a day in Bilbao sampling the local food and drink, seeing the sights, consuming cultural delights and buying clean underwear.

Jump to airport arrival time and our flight already had a 30 minute delay when we arrived and a strange sense of Deja Vu swept over us as the delay climbed again and reached the two hour mark once again. Thankfully however a plane did arrive at around 11.30

 

 

We flew to Stansted, arrived around 1am, stayed in the hotel we had booked (a dour Holiday Inn express) as there was no easy / affordable way to get us to Manchester to collect the car and then get me back to London the following day. We had decided to get the train from Stansted to London, I would stay there my wife would then travel to Manchester from Euston, collect the car, pay the excess parking and drive on home to see our children. And that was the end of our journey. A bit of a pain and quite a bit of cash shelled out because of that pain. Around £350. My wife had also missed a shift at work and she could not take it as holiday so we were out of pocket too. All in it cost us around £550.

 

The attempt to claim expenses

After getting back home, I did not get the job I had gone to London for, I gathered up all our receipts and tried to work out how were were going to claim for it. Lots of people has said we would be due some compensation but our excitement on that front was quickly dampened as it turns out that French Air Traffic Control Strikes are extraordinary circumstances even though there have been over 40 strike days over the last seven years.

To claim for the expenses I needed to submit photos of all receipts, along with an itemised list of all expenditure. The form states that ‘We aim to review all claims within 21 days.’ which is reassuring. I had to submit it via this form which as you can tell by looking at it was designed with just this very task in mind. The ability to upload BMP files is a nice touch especially with that 10mb attachment limit.

 

easyjet-claim-form

 

I submitted the receipts on the 4th of April. I received a case ID & confirmation and all seemed well. I then got an email saying the receipts had not uploaded correctly. I then emailed them over again, twice. Still no confirmation of receipt. I then tried to call and contact via any means available. Clearly I did not get much joy

 

A pattern of communication being one way was established early. I called and chased to try and get an understanding of whether my expenses were actually received and on their systems. I was promised answers and call backs and none came. I was quite/very angry/frustrated throughout.

Then on the 25th I snapped and called Easyjet for an update. I also took to Twitter to whine because that is what we do in 2016 to make us feel better and because we are all entitled shits etc.

 

While I was busy whining I actually missed an email. It was a great email.

 

Dear Aden Davies,

Thank you for contacting easyJet.

I can confirm that I have assess your receipts for you.We will not refund for the not itemize receipts. We will be refunding you the following:

Food:94.34 GBP

Transport:678 GBP

Total Amount:772.32

It will be refund as a cheque once you confirm that these amounts are correct.

We look forward to be hearing from you soon.
Get in! They were willing to not only cover my expenses but to pay and extra £200 to cover the pain of this last month. What nice people they are behind all those frustrating process.

 

I got a follow up email from another department the day after, the 26th of April….

 

Dear Aden,

Thank you for contacting easyJet.

I am sorry to hear about any inconveniences caused regarding the flight being cancelled.

I can confirm that I have issued a cheque of 772.32 GBP which you will receive within 14 working days, please note that the voucher is valid for 6 months.

Thank you for choosing to fly with easyJet.

 

Now the mention of a voucher worried me and I asked and it apparently it was nothing to worry about. In 14 days time this unpleasantness would all be over. I even apologised publicly to Easyjet.

 

 

I should not have wasted my metaphorical breath on an apology because 14 days came and went with no cheque in sight.

Then I got another email.

 

Dear Mr Davies,

Thank you for your response.
Some of the receipts which you have sent are just credit card slip and are invalid as we need the actual itemised merchant receipts.
As per our policy we do not reimburse for car park and underwear.
Please reply with itemised copies for the credit card slips without corresponding store receipts.
We look forward to your response.

 

Then on May 12th

 

Dear Aden,

Thanks for reaching out. We´ve just checked your profile and we can confirm with you that your cheque has been issued on the 10th of May and it will take 14 days to reach your address.

 

What happened to the cheque that ‘I can confirm that I have issued a cheque of 772.32 GBP’ on the 26th of April? Why was a cheque issued on the 10th of May? Why was it issued if one had already been issued? What exactly does the word issued mean when issued by Easyjet customer service staff?

I received this Twitter DM on the 27th of May.

Thanks for getting in touch with us.
As I can see in my records there were no problems with your cheques.
Could you please confirm your postal address again, before I escalate your case?
Our finance department authorized 2 cheques for you, one for 165 GBP and one for 92.68 EUR.
Thanks in advance for your reply!
Enjoy your day

 

They had actually been posted to my old address that somehow Easyjet had on file from old bookings. Somewhere between April the 26th and May the 27th we went from my expense claim repayment going from £772.37 to £165 and 92.68 Euros. No cheques for any of those values have ever arrived at my house, I have no way of knowing if they arrived at the old house either (it has only been 4 years since I lived there). This was the first time I had been asked to confirm my address. As you can imagine I was not best pleased.

I then made the first of my empty / powerless threats.

I never followed up on it of course.

It is just born out of frustration. There is no recourse in this situation. There is no ombudsman. I had no means of escalation and felt entirely powerless. I wanted access to my file history. The company must have a log/several logs across several systems of all interactions with me. I wanted to see this picture. I wanted to understand how such a screw up could happen.

 

Nope. Then on the 6th of June another rubbish email.

Dear Aden,

Thank you for contacting easyJet.

I have checked your booking and 2 cheques have been issued on 04 March 2016, one with the value of 165 GBP and the second cheque to the value of 92.68 EUR. The cheque will take 21 working days to reach you and is valid for 6 months. The hotel will not be refunded as we have checked our flight time and the flight arrived at 22:00 on the 21 March 2016.

Some of the receipts which you have sent us are just credit card slip and are invalid as we need the actual itemized merchant receipts. We also do not pay for purchase of personal items.

This email again mentioned these random two cheques and was just nonsense. The flight was late by around 90 minutes in the end. The fact that we had flown to Stansted 24 hours after our supposed flight to Manchester which is over 200 miles away and where our car was seems completely lost on this representative.

After more gnashing of teeth, futile messages and empty responses I finally called and spoke to someone who actually gave a damn. Leanne was her name and she was shocked at the state of my case. She actually told me she was going upstairs to speak to the team involved, the most effort anyone had put in so far. She reassured me it had been escalated and that the team it had been passed too would resolve it quickly as they were empowered to do so….

 

 

They didn’t. I never heard a thing until a crap email on the 4th of July, I thought it was independence day not incompetence day.

 

Dear Mr Davies,

Please accept my apologies for the situation regarding the refund that was due to you.

As it has been an error of process I have escalated it up to my Team Leader and as soon as he gets back to me which will be in the next few days I would get back to you.

Once again I am sorry that for all the inconvenience and hope that it does not deter you from future use with easyJet.

 

More escalation! Whoopdefuckingdoo.

I did receive a call in July, although I missed it but they left a message where I think I was promised the full amount. Nothing transpired.

I had run out of steam. Also I had to go on my honeymoon. Nothing really happened for a month or so and then all of a sudden it was August. I was rested, suntanned, fatter, skinter and ready to try again.

Then I called. it must not have gone well

 

 

A day later a Twitter rep got in touch. We exchanged some DM’s. August saw a lot of DM’s exhanged. It was a fucking shambles of a display. It started badly and went down hill from there.

 

easyjet-aug-dm-1

 

This turned out to be absolute bullshit. Not only was this random figure of 534 euros plucked seemingly out of thin air but it was also the first and only time the ability to pay me back electronically was mentioned.

I was livid at this point. I called sometime in August and properly did that annoying thing of just demanding to speak to someone more senior. I got up to some mid level nobody and basically kept him captive on the phone until he made some sort of promise of resolution and put it in an email so I had it in writing. They were still banging on about the two cheques for £165 and 92 euros and that they needed to be cancelled. FFS.

 

Dear Aden,

Thank you for contacting easyJet.

I do sincerely apologise about all frustrations and inconveniences you have incurred.
I have sent the details to our Finance Team so that they may cancel the cheque and as soon as I receive a response, I will be able to contact you with the next steps. The reason this cheque is being cancelled is because the address was incorrect and has to now be reprocessed.
The time frame I was advised is 3 days, how ever I confirm that I advised you of 48 hours. Once they respond to me, I will be able to contact you.
Your case number is 101435698.
Thank you for your patience.

 



I was a bit of a twat to this man and I am sorry for that but I was completely despondent. My pitiful pleas of ‘What would you do in my situation’ ‘I have no idea what on earth else to do’ were futile at best. I then spoke to someone and demanded a breakdown of the situation. I wanted an explanation of where these random figures had come from. Basically what the hell was going on.


 


Dear Aden,


Thank you for contacting easyJet.


Please be advised that the receipts below was received from you to be reimbursed. 


    

  • 79 Gbp for hotel (valid)
    • 

  • 14.72 Euro for meals (valid)
    • 

  • 26.10 Eur for taxi (valid)
    • 

  • 3 Euro x2 bus (valid)
    • 

  • 40 Gbp for parking (valid)
    • 

  • 26.30 Euro meals (valid)
    • 

  • 14.50 Euro meals (valid)
    • 

  • 81.40 Gbp train (valid)
    • 

  • 2.12 Euro hotel (valid) 
    • 



Please note that the following receipts is not legible:




    

  • abello stansted express (the amount looks like it could be 38 gbp)
    • 



Please note that the following receipts is not considered valid, as we need itemized receipts in the claim for reimbursement. The following receipts are c/c copies which we cannot accept: 




    

  • 36.70 Euro- bilbao tezenis  copia de recibo (personal items) 
    • 

  • 32 Gbp -BBVA? 
    • 

  • 8.50 Gbp – elavon?
    • 



Kindly note that the following receipt will not be reimbursed as we do not reimburse alcoholic beverages:




    

  • 2.32 Euro beer
    • 





Also please note that our finance deparment has authorized to reimburse you the amount of Euro 534.27.






Having checked your booking I can confirm that a cheque was processed more than once but was declined because of the incorrect amount processed. 




Also please note that when the cheque was declined the second time it was because the following receipts was already processed and authorized in the form of a cheque on 04 May ’16:




    

  • 165 Gbp for transport and
    • 

  • 94.34 Gbp for meals 
    • 



Should you need any further information about your claim please contact our contact centre on 0330 365 5000.






I wish you a good day and look forward to your reply. 






The figure of 534 euros has never been explained to me but this email I got again referred to the previous two cheques seems to suggest that they thought I had been paid the £165 and 92 euros and that the 535 euros would cover the rest to get close to the mythical £772.37. This was never clarified. Also refusing to buy me one beer after all this shit is just plain rude.


 


I also wrote a little ditty in August about Easyjet. to the tune of the old Spiderman theme tune. I think I may have been on the verge of some sort of breakdown.





August came and went with more pointless exchanges, into September where things got progressively worse my temper included. I think I had been quite polite up until this point considering the incompetence on display. A call around the 23rd of September after being told to wait a few more days, and then ten more days and never ever getting anything back but always having to chase and I had again reached a point of fury.


I don’t even remember what the screw up was. My DM’s or email reveal nothing either.


 





 


If you are not familiar with the work of Ian then you should be. He was good enough to provide me with some top notch swearing.


 





 


It was the high point in this clusterfuck.


Strangely though it was a less abusive term that got me told off. This bizarre DM exchange happened around this time.


 


easyjet-aug-dm-3


 


I am sorry for calling the service rep an idiot. Apparently my case had also been closed. Nope. Me sticking the boot in on Stefani over her DM incompetence was uncalled for but felt good at the time, I mean I can’t even spell not correctly. Sorry Stefani.


More emails followed saying cheques for 534 euros had been ‘issued’. Even though I said I did not accept that amount. The cheques never arrived anyway because issued means something other than ‘supply someone with something’ in the land of Easyjet.


Then I think I rang up again. I spoke to someone who informed me the amount had become £534, this was around about the time that the currencies were pretty much on par. At this point I would have accepted 534 guineas…or gummi bears. I was done. They issued yet another cheque and told me to wait 14 days.


Have a guess what happened folks?





…I snapped yet again. No way I was settling for £534. Pay me the £772.37 promised way back on the 26th of April. I am in for the long haul now. Fuck you, pay me.


 


easyjet-dm-oct-screwup


 


 


More angry calls, DM’s, public tweets etc. Only this time it worked…kind of…


 


Dear Aden,


Thank you very much for your patience through this entire matter.


I confirm I have processed a cheque of 772.32 GBP to the new postal address you have provided me with. This will 14-21 working days to be delivered to you.


We hope the inconvenience caused does not affect your choice to fly with us in future.


 


and a follow up DM


easyjet-oct-dm-1

Yes sorted! My credit card could be paid!


I was happy.


But cautious.


 


And rightly so because I have still not received that cheque. Over 30 working days after it was promised.


I have never received so much as a tracking number for the posting of this or any of the other cheques.


I have only once been offered a means of electronic payment in the year of 2016.


On the 30th of November I received this message


 





 


An email was sent to another team! Escalation in action five days after I was promised a call. The team will contact me soon. I believe soon maybe an acronym rather than an actual word. Sometime Or Other, Never. Once I again I am trapped. I refuse to call to have someone else go ‘Wow there is a lot if entries here, can you just go on hold for 20 minutes while I try and digest this shitstorm and then formulate the least efficient method to get back to you (circa 10-30 days) and give you another empty promise containing the words ‘soon’ ‘as possible’ ‘shortly’ ‘urgently’ and other weasel words that are not an actual date and time because you know…


 





Heaven forfend I should be given wrong expectations.


 


And this is where we are on the 30th of November 2016. 255 days after I flew back into Stansted on the 21st of March 2016. 250 days since I first submitted my receipts. 218 days since the 26th of April when I was informed a cheque for £772.37 was issued (apparently to the wrong address) that never arrived. 44 days since the 17th of October when I was told a cheque for that amount had been issued and sent to the correct address and would arrive within 30 days.


 


Here are a few other numbers


26 – emails exchanged

117 – Direct Messages exchanged on twitter. You can see them all here (I have edited address details etc. you can still feel my exasperation though)

5,100 – Words in those Direct Messages

153 – Public tweets, to from and about @easyjet. You can see them all here.

6,200 – Words in those public tweets

nn – Countless phone calls. Unfortunately I do not know how many as frustratingly I don’t have itemised billing with EE. I can clearly remember 4 calls that were all over an hour. I would guess I have called somewhere between 10-20 times.

3 – number of calls back I have had back from Easyjet if memory serves. 4 if you include the one where they left a message.

0 – Number of letters from Easyjet. Absolutely nothing on paper which strikes me as odd.

16 – the number of different case numbers I have had (that I know of)

31 – Number of times the word escalate or escalated was used in emails and DMs and tweets. I think it actually just means passed to another department.

742 – estimated amounts I have sworn during this farce.

5 – Hours spent writing this post, which adds another 3,000 words to the total.

4,000 – words in this post

15,000 – roughly the amount of words used so far. As way of context Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors is only 14,710 words long. Someone call Alanis Morisette.


0 – pounds paid of my expense claim from Easyjet as of the 30th of November 2016.


 


But wait! A call from out of the blue/orange


At 10.21am on the 30th of November I received a call from Easyjet, from someone empowered to resolve my case. They said that the figure they had in their records was for £534. I laughed. She did not take that kindly. I have been requested to provide details of the messages where I was promised £772 (even though they have access but don’t want to go through all the other messages) and to provide my account details to help speed the resolution of this matter (a glimmer of a cheque free future). Annoying my phone decided to reboot itself mid call. To their credit Easyjet called straight back


 





 


I have taken the decision to publish this story anyway even if it jeopardises that process as I have invested so many hours in its writing and in its wider creation.


 


UPDATE: I FINALLY GOT PAID!!!!


 





 


How could Easyjet fix this? Assuming they want to that is…


Pay me £772.37 obviously. Beyond that though this issue is not really about me (although I have just written 3,000 all about my pain). I suspect there are hundreds in similar situations from both the strike in March but just through general flight cancellations and delays.


I could write another few thousand words on this bit alone. I am also available for consultancy, my day rate is £772.37. I will freely share three key themes though.


 


Ownership


After things had started to go wrong in May this should have been truly escalated and consolidated into a single case, given to a specific team, assigned a single global reference number. that would have given me a sense that my case was important, that it has been escalated and that there was an owner of it. A named individual would have been even better. This is an unlikely scenario but 8 months in and all this effort on my part and cost on your part and maybe you should give it a try.


The other side of ownership is allowing staff to actually take ownership of problems. The UKs most recommended bank, first direct, (I should mention used to work for them briefly) are the most loved mainly because of their telephone service. What underpins this is the ownership taken on calls by the first person who answers to have that call resolved satisfactorily, even if it is passed to another department. There were a few notable people I spoke with at Easyjet who were genuinely shocked by the hassle I had been through and I believe they really wanted to help but everything was against them. Departmental and operational silos and awful IT systems.


 


Shitty systems


Both the computerised versions and the operational versions. Throughout these annoying interactions I could see the seams of the organisation. I heard phrases like ‘only the email team can see emails’ or ‘all we can do through Social Media is ask for updates’ which just show up the silos for what they are.


Onto the IT systems. Spend some money on a messaging system. Allow a customer to talk to you through that channel. Make it responsive, make it good. Allow people to see a full thread of the conversation over time.


Better yet get your shit together. Why more companies don’t make a record of contact history available to a customer is a mystery. Show the customer what you did and when. Call times, emails sent, tweets, live chat conversations, receipts submitted, people spoken to or at least some sort of number that identifies them. Give a high level overview of what happened / is happening, Make it transparent so that people can see progress. Notifications like this can avoid people calling back in. We know that human to human conversation is expensive.


I was, and will continue to, attack you on all fronts. Communicate via any and all means just to try and get an answer. You should either drive me to the most efficient channel for me or better yet be able to tie those threads together. Look at systems like the ones provided by the likes of Lithium. I know customer service costs money but I am sure shit customer service costs more.  You just need to think about it from a different perspective rather than the lowest common denominator one you seem to have today.


I must also give special mention to your expenses claim form. For Gods sake please spend a few grand on a decent service designer and a developer or two and build a better form.


Also what the hell is this screen? It is part of the booking details screen.


wtf-easyjet


It feels like it has some glimmer of useful information i.e. the payments seem to match some of those promised. Fix this to cater for these kinds of situations. Show what has been ‘issued’ or approved for payment. Then show details of say posting said payment. It is not rocket science.


A special mention to your phone line. It takes over 90 seconds before you are presented with an option. I found that choosing cancel a flight (a fee incurring service) got me through to a person the quickest by far. Also stop using Human by The Killers as your hold music. Your service has very little human about it, I did want to kill though after being subjected to it.





 


And stop sending cheques….well start sending them but you know what I mean, it is 2016. Many forms of electronic payments are available.


 


Give a fuck


the amount of empathy shown by the vast majority of staff I have interacted with has been sparse to say the least and in the main cut and pasted. My grumpiness may not have helped but you drove me to this (mostly). The lack of caring about people started in the queue at Bilbao airport and has not ended since. I imagine you have a lot of these claims and many disgruntled customers because airlines are tricky businesses to run. Flying machines all over the globe is not easy. Customer service in comparison though is. If you give a fuck about it.


 


Ultimately this situation could have been avoided if enough people at Easyjet gave a fuck. I could have avoided a lot of sress and hassle. As it is though my stress and hassle is not over as I have still not been paid. I still have to chase empty promises, vague weasel words brought about by a lack of owenrship, shitty systems and the fact that you clearly don’t give a fuck about me or I imagine the hundreds of others in similar situations as mine right now.


                        


                        
                            


                                

                                
                                    November 30, 2016

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Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991)


Young John Connor uses his Atari Portfolio to hack into the ATM of the Federal Security Bank. I wonder how many nerds have the PIN 9003 because of this film?










                        


                        
                            


                                

                                
                                    November 19, 2016

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The Stepford Wives (2004)


This poor remake features a remarkable futuristic film money scenario. A wife that dispenses dollar bills following the insertion of a card into her mouth. Disturbing.








                        


                        
                            


                                

                                
                                    November 19, 2016

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The day Fintechbot died (sort of)


                                                
                        
                        


                            
Halloween 2016 was a sad day. It is the day the Bit.ly owned Twitterfeed closed it’s doors. It is a brilliantly simple service I have used for years to power Fintechbot. Now it is gone and I need some new services to help replicate what Twitterfeed does/did.


 


What is Fintechbot and what it needs to keep it running.


Fintechbot is an automated fintech news bot for Twitter. It takes stories from a number of RSS sources and then publishes the post title and the URL in a tweet. It appends each tweet with the twitter account of the source of that story.


I currently feed through 120 RSS feeds. All my sources are here, this list probably needs a prune / check to see if these RSS feeds are all still working.  85 of those are unfiltered as they are pure fintech sources. Whenever a new story appears on those feeds it gets posted to Fintechbot. The other 35 feeds are filtered i.e. they only post stories that feature key words that I have assigned. It would be very nice to have a list of words that can be easily applied to multiple feeds. Editing this list (adding/removing key words) would impact all that are filtered.


I also control the outputs so that no single source can post more than 3 stories at any one time in a set period e.g. per hour.


And that is it really.


 


How to remake it


The obvious fix is to choose a solution such as Buffer, Social Pilot, Twibble or Dlvr.it. The only issue is the cost for such a great number of RSS feeds. Dlvr.it looks like the best option as I use it for my filtered posts today but that would be $30 per month.


I could merge the RSS feeds into a single mega feed but that means I would lose source and be unable to credit the posters. I do not want to do that. I have however been looking at Yahoo! Pipes alternatives….most of them have gone the way of that amazing service too unfortunately.


IFTTT and Zapier have been mentioned as solution but their filtering and control of RSS feeds is very basic indeed. My first few tests with IFTTT failed to retrieve any articles from an RSS feed at all.


I have been looking for pieces that allow me to host this myself. This would be my preferred option…the big issue is that I do not have the skills to build something. Feedparser looks like a very useful tool for bringing in the posts and potentially formatting them ready for publishing. I would then need a publishing mechanism. My python skills are none existent though and I am a bit unsure where to begin.


I was hoping there maybe a couple of wordpress plugins that might be able to cover my needs but I have not found anything that fits the bill just yet. http://www.wprssposter.com/ and http://www.bloggerposter.com/ have some of the features need but they are mostly aimed at taking stories from RSS and feeding them into a WordPress blog unsurprisingly.


My most promising avenue at the moment is using Google Docs. It looks like I could use the IMPORTFEED function in Google Sheets to pull in stories from the feeds. This little tutorial explains it well and how you can use it as an RSS reader.


From there I need a means of publishing each new RSS item into a new row and adding the twitter account of the source ready for publishing. This autotweeter Google Sheets template looks like just the ticket. If I can feed that spreadsheet with IMPORTRANGE I might be on to a winner.


I do however feel that may be a longshot. The tutorial that template is built on is by Zach Whelan and he states one thing missing is the ‘pull live data from a realtime API’. Zapier to Google Docs could create new row eveytime a new item appears. You can’t set up 120 Zapier zaps for each RSS for free though.


Nothing is easy for idiots that can’t code and expect something for free. I feel like I am missing some obvious pieces of functionality here I also feel I am overlooking some obvious issues too.


If anyone has any tips / ideas on alternative solutions then please do let me know. If anyone fancies helping me with Feedparser Python app then also please get in touch. I am sure you all want to save my sad little alter ego on Twitter as much as I do.


 


Update 05/11/16: My esteemed former colleague, Paul Dougan, reminded me about Feed2OMB a service for publishing RSS Feeds to Microblogs. He used it at our former employers to build something that would feed Fintechbot to an internal Statusnet. He also mentioned Microsoft’s new IFTTT clone, Flow. On first glance it looks like just the ticket. Far more RSS feed control than IFTTT and with better options for adding other conditions to flows so hopefully I can work out how to post limited numbers of links per hour. I am going to add some RSS feeds to it this weekend to test it further.


 


Update 11/01/17: Not got round to doing much with this yet. The services like IFTTT and Flow cannot give me the output I want as they cannot include @ symbols. Python looks like a decent option at the moment and the two programs mentioned above cover most of the functionality. A third is needed to work with the Twitter API, https://github.com/bear/python-twitter looks good to me. As does Tweepy. This article about making bots also of interest. Let’s see how far I get.


 


Update 18/01/17: I failed. Miserably. This is what I think I need to do. I think there are a few parts to this


    

  1. Hold a list of RSS feeds to be checked (Phase 2 check feeds still working / have updated in the last x days)
    2. 

  2. Check periodically for new items (Phase 2 requirement allow checking by keywords i.e. if new post does not contain a list of key words don’t queue, only applied to some feeds i.e. ones that are not pure Fintech news)
    3. 

  3. When new items are posted hold them in a queue ready for publishing
    4. 

  4. Publish to Twitter in a controlled manner e.g. no more than x posts at a time, no more than x in an hour? (Phase 2 look at other publishing points e.g. Linked In, Tumblr)
    5. 

  5. The ability to add a prefix/suffix to the tweet e.g. by @nameofpersonwhowrotethestory or #Podcast
    6. 

  6. I think that is it…
    7. 



I think the initial functionality is provided by Feed2OMB but that then needs an update to allow it to post to Twitter using a Python to Twitter tool like the ones mentioned in the comment above. I have no ide how to stictch those things together or how to install on my webserver.


                        


                        
                            


                                

                                
                                    November 1, 2016

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The Island (2005)


Set in 2019 this dystopian flick on clones being created for insurance purposes features some interesting future money scenarios. Wearable wrist bands provide nutrition information and allowances for the clones but also allows them to buy drinks. When the escape the island and arrive in real world 2019 the credit cards of the world are still plastic, still swipeable and can be used in bizarre MSN Search booths.  


                        


                        
                            


                                

                                
                                    October 17, 2016

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Swordfish (2001)


A computing interface classic, a classic wire transfer interface. Hugh Jackman transfers the money, spread across multiple accounts at the demands of John Travolta’s overblown terrorist character, but then just as he is about to leave the numbers on the screen start moving back to zero. Classic wire transfer and recall switcheroo. 


                        


                        
                            


                                

                                
                                    October 11, 2016

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Minority Report (2002)


One of, if not the, most iconic use of design fiction in film so I expected far more future money but no. Amex get a mention during the famously creepy personalised retina based advertisement scene. We don’t quite see how Tom pays for his drugs. We do see that Tom pays for his new eye balls with what appears to be a magstripe credit card. judging by the way it is gleefully swiped. EMV still not fully rolled out then by 2054 in the US. Not a shock to be honest.  




                        


                        
                            


                                

                                
                                    September 21, 2016

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The 6th Day (2000) 


Arnie awakes in a daze in the back of a cab. He pays his fare with a simple press of the thumb on the touch screen taxi meter. He does not even question the exorbitant fee. 


                        


                        
                            


                                

                                
                                    September 12, 2016

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