There but for the grace of the angels go I.

So if you have a RBS, NatWest or Ulster Bank account you probably don't need telling that something went very, very badly titsup last week. Stories of people being stuck in jail as their bail could not be paid, people temporarily homeless as solicitors couldn't hand over keys on house transactions and so on and so forth.

It appears the cause was a screw up in operating the software which schedules the processing of the various software programs that makes up the bank's "books" as it were. When I first started in IT I was a junior programmer writing those kinds of programs on a Burroughs mainframe for what was then The Midland Bank. The overnight suite must have been over 150 discrete programs all of which had dependencies on others and the RBS suite is almost certainly no different and probably much more complex and relies on a lump of code called "CA7" to ensure everything runs when it should. Now it seems some change was made within CA7 that didn't work and needed to be "backed out"; this sort of thing happens all the time in software releases and before releasing any change to a production environment you always, without fail, have a backout plan. Regrettably for RBS a junior numpty, hired on the cheap and operating out of Hyderabad  (RBS having saved money by sacking all the UK based very experienced staff) rather than removing the change removed everything, completely wiping the schedule database.

Oops.

This fiasco will probably end up costing RBS, in other words me and you the taxpayers, upwards of 500 million quid when everything is taken into account. How's that cost saving working out for you RBS?

I do feel sorry for the junior numpty though; that must have been the longest stomach-churning "Oh fuck. What have I just done" moment in history. And I defy anyone in IT to say they've never had one.

Mine was back in those junior coder days, wrangling COBOL on the overnight batch systems. Late on friday there was some urgent patch needed to a part of code that handled automated cheque book issuing (back when people used cheques our code worked out when you were running low and ordered a new book to be printed and sent). I made the change but didn't really have time to test it but it was a two line change and I told my supervisor this.

"Are you sure it's OK? You sure you put that full stop in the right place?" she said whilst putting her coat on. Clearly she didn't intend to check it.

"Yes, definitely" said a supremely confident dragon and uploaded the code and clocked off.

I woke on Saturday morning with the gnawing feeling something was wrong. I could see the code in my head. I could see that full stop. It was in the WRONG FUCKING PLACE!

I'd terminated an "If... Then... Else" structure too early.

I have ordered every single Midland Bank current account customer a new sodding cheque book at a cost to the bank of tens of thousands of pounds.

After regaining control of my stomach I started to contemplate what my new career would be because it certainly wasn't going to be computer programming. Maybe herding yak in Tibet would be more my line.

Monday came and I went in to face the music. All the team looked at me as I walked in. I waited for the hammer to fall.

It never did. In inadvertently screwing up that if/else structure I'd caused some other part of the subroutine to fail and so no books got ordered at all. The code could be patched (and I did the patch) so the missing sends would get picked up on the next run. I'd dodged a bullet and, 25 years later, I'm still wrangling code and not yak.

Don't think that chap in Hyderabad is going to get that chance.

Have a free tent

If you've been reading this blog for a while you know I refer to my employer as "Banko Di Haggis" (just to keep the HR police from finding it in the search engines) but it's pretty obvious who I'm talking about; the national pariah and politician's whipping boy bank.

And as it happens favourite target of those lovely Home Counties trustafarian protesters and on Monday, whilst our CEO caved in to political pressure from the left and 300 million quid got wiped off the value of the company we all own one crusty arsehole taking a break from his media studies and nail care degree pops up with a tent in front of the office.

Much to my amusement when I left for the day I noticed he (I assume it was a he, didn't want to get too close because of the smell) had a placard pinned to his tent reading "My tent for your bonus".

I should have gone up and walked off with his tent. Because my bonus this year is the same as last year, and the year before that, a big fat nothing. Zero. Zilch. Da Nada.

Oh and no pay rises either. Sure I've built a computer system that made a several million quid and helped save the department from the recent axe and has won industry awards as the best in its class but I don't even get a pat on the tail for being a good dragon. And I can tell you that for the vast majority in the building our crusty class warrior was squatting outside the same is true.

Sure I'm a little pissed, everyone wants more money right? But I get paid pretty handsomely for doing what I do so what the hell, I just won't bother going that extra mile any more (as if I ever did!) and if a better gig crops up I'll probably take it if for no other reason I really can't be arsed with the shoeing we keep getting from the political class and cockwallets like our "99%" friend camping out on the doorstep and tarring us all with the same brush.

And it won't be just me, anyone who can get a job elsewhere will slowly but surely slide away and that pisses me off more than ever because having stumped up the cash to bale out Banko Di Haggis* you would think the government would want it to succeed, turn a profit and pay back all that money rather than turn it into some unprofitable extension of the treasury staffed effectively by civil servants too talentless or idle to get a gig anywhere else.

But then why should the politicians care, it's not as though they put their hands in their own pockets for the bail out money.

They put them in your pockets.




* For the record I think it should have been allowed to fail, even though I'd have been out of work

What do we want? Unicorn sex slaves! When do we want them? Now!

You might have noticed that over in the US of A a bunch of the usual eco-weenies, lefty dreamers and, well anyone who wants to "stick it to The Man" has taken a leaf from our home grown crusties this side of the pond and have "organised" (for a given value of "organise") "Occupy Wall Street" to, well,  just have a grumble about the "eeeeevil nasty bankers" and get the opportunity for a ruck with New York's finest as far as I could work out.

But as it happens they have a set of demands, or rather a proposed list of demands that will no doubt be decided on after a good circle drumming session and a couple of herbal jazz cigarettes.Go and have a laugh at the utter naivete on display over here.

A couple of my favourites

Demand two: Institute a universal single payer healthcare system. To do this all private insurers must be banned from the healthcare market as their only effect on the health of patients is to take money away from doctors, nurses and hospitals preventing them from doing their jobs and hand that money to wall st. investors.

I think you'll find that those insurers actually, you know, use the premiums and shit to kinda build hospitals, buy medical equipment and pay the salaries of those doctors and nurses.

Demand one: Restoration of the living wage. This demand can only be met by ending "Freetrade" by re-imposing trade tariffs on all imported goods entering the American market to level the playing field for domestic family farming and domestic manufacturing as most nations that are dumping cheap products onto the American market have radical wage and environmental regulation advantages. Another policy that must be instituted is raise the minimum wage to twenty dollars an hr.

Yea, and with a minimum wage at twenty bucks an hour causing production costs to spiral and hobson's choice about where you get your goods from as you don't have any imports your average citizen is going to be able to afford anything how, exactly?

And anyway, who is going to bother working because:

Demand three: Guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment.

everyone's going to be sat on their arse and getting $20 to do so.

But the best one has got to be this:

Demand eleven: Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all. Debt forgiveness of sovereign debt, commercial loans, home mortgages, home equity loans, credit card debt, student loans and personal loans now! All debt must be stricken from the "Books." World Bank Loans to all Nations, Bank to Bank Debt and all Bonds and Margin Call Debt in the stock market including all Derivatives or Credit Default Swaps, all 65 trillion dollars of them must also be stricken from the "Books." And I don't mean debt that is in default, I mean all debt on the entire planet period.

Awesome. Truly awesome. This stands as a shining pillar of "What the fuck?" in an already sparkling sea of cuntwittery.

I am going to demand a unicorn sex slave¹. I want it here, and I want it now.




¹ Not fussy about gender, I'm an enlightened 21st century dragon.

Let the witch-hunt begin

You probably don't subscribe to the daily "Here is the City" email newsletter because if you're reading this blog odds are you don't work in the City of London¹ but pretty much everyone in The City (and the annexe down at Canary Wharf) does so it's a pretty fair bet that yesterday lunchtime when the newsletter came out there were a few ruined keyboards as they got sprayed with half eaten sandwiches in HR and up on the management floor when this little item hit the streets.

First things first, it's not from me. As I've previously mentioned I rank on the organisation chart at about the same level as the mould behind the coffee machine and this reads as if it's come from someone around mid-levels in the corporate food chain. It also reads as someone whose been "Pissed On and Passed Over" for promotion - I certainly don't recognise the part about bringing in external people rather than promoting internally, that's not what I've seen in my few years at Banko Di Haggis and I've seen plenty of people who want to climb the greasy pole be able to so.

Also there's this...

And joining the bank's full-time payroll in the coming weeks will be a number of 'conversions' - temp or contractor staff who will be given full time jobs...

... so if B di H is such a rotten place to work how come these contractors have taken the shilling and kissed the book? Much of my team is made up of contract to perm conversions (hell I'm one!) so they must have seen something worthwhile? It's not as though there are no contract jobs out there at good rates, I must get about 50 emails and a couple of phone calls a week from job pimps trying to push me to 600 - 700 quid a day gigs.

That said pretty much everything else he says seems to feel right. I've largely ignored "Northstar" and "Napier" and "WorkOut" and the "Enormous Giraffe Willy"² projects but that's only because I do my level best to ignore any kind of management initiatives that can be summed up in a single word and some sort of crappy motivational poster stuck on the wall next to our mouldy coffee machine as much as possible. But its certainly true that Northstar does seem to have been hanging around like a bad smell for quite a while.

Anyway regardless of what he said and its veracity or otherwise I think it's a fair bet that right now a thorough search to identify said anonymous disgruntled employee is probably ongoing and HR are warming up the branding irons and dusting off the rack and iron maiden. Old timers here might recall my former work blog called "That's Not a Bug Its A Feature" that bumbled along with a few dozen readers until the Sunday Times decided to make it one of their blogs of the week. Within 24 hours I was getting hit after hit from inside Banko di Haggis and even though I'd not said anything too bad about the place I dropped the blog quicker than I would drop radioactive elk shit as soon as I saw the visitor logs.

Anonymous, whoever you are good luck. If they find you and you manage to keep your job then I'll be happy to introduce you to your new peers - the mould behind the coffee machine.





¹ In fact the odds are you're someone who landed here when you were googling for "furry dragon porn" - how many times do I have to tell you we are not sodding furry!
² I think I might have imagined that one.

The latest crop of whining gits...

... camped out outside the office and sticking it to the man



Christ alone knows what they were campaigning against, the pitiful placards said something about "Real Jobs" and I am assuming PCS is some union or other, probably for people with nice cushy public sector jobs and wanting all bankers strung up by their goolies whilst simultaneously failing to realise that if we disappear so does all that taxpayers money... ah, you're probably net consumers of tax money anyway so like you fucking care.

But don't worry guys, we're doing a bang up job ourselves of screwing up Banko di Haggis. We are actually hiring, we have budget to do so (wow!) and my team lined up a guy to do some front-end stuff...

... only to be told we can't hire him as we haven't filled out quota of hiring people in India yet and when we have filled our Indian quota then we can hire people in the UK.

We're owned by Gordon Brown remember? Remember "British Jobs For British Workers" Gordon?

Jesus fucking Christ on a pogo-stick.


(PS: drop me a comment if you can write C# and fancy working alongside a fire breathing lizard with an attitude problem in an organisation that's a national pariah for destroying Curly Wurlys)

We got the crusties

You may have seen on the news that some of the trustafarian "climate change" protesters currently infesting Blackheath decided to target Banko di Haggis today:

"Protesters glued to floor of bank"

Well as your scaly green chum was there, they decided to occupy the next row of desks to where I sit, let me let you in on a few details as to how this actually went down.

Firstly, here they are should you pass them in the street and want to give them the business end of a breath weapon turned up to "toasty" so they can experience some Local Climate Change.



Nice looking bunch of layabouts filling in those long summer months before heading back to uni to that all important Media Studies degree.

Protesters have glued their hands to the floor of the Royal Bank of Scotland headquarters in the City of London.

As you can quite clearly see their hands are not glued to the floor at all, what they did was actually glue themselves to each other with one of them putting his arm around a pole supporting a TV similar to the one on the right of my picture.

Twelve Climate Camp protesters dressed as construction workers stuck themselves to the floor while a further 100 protested outside.

As you can see they are NOT dressed as construction workers, and there were in fact six of them.

To be honest they were pretty well behaved for protestors and just sat there occasionally chanting their "whose planet - our planet" chants plus another one that seemed to go to the tune of those old Jack Dee beer commercials (the "Widget, it's got a widget, a lovely widget, a widget it has got" one) and every so often one of them would start banging on to the gathered wage slaves of B de H about how bad we were and we should be nice to mummy earth and "as traders you can make a difference"

It was at this point that some kindly employee pointed out to them that, although this looked like a trading floor all the traders had moved and we were, in fact, a bunch of IT guys and beancounters.

The plod were, as you would expect with every employee of the bank wielding a pretty high end mobile phone camera, (and no it was not me that sent these images to the Daily Fail) being on their best behaviour despite one of the gobby little shits who looked not unlike Japan's bass player Mick Khan giving it a load of verbals about how the police were breaking the law by not giving their names (son, they don't need to, only their numbers) and eventually the riot act was read to them, they refused to shift until RBS stopped hurting mummy nature and some chaps with solvents turned up, put safetey goggles on the crusties and de-glued them. Of course our little protesters wanted to milk this for all they could get so despite the gig being up they insisted on being dragged out...



About two hours later one of my colleagues reported that our unwashed friends were outside the front of the building once more, no doubt having been taken down to Bishopsgate nick and then let straight out with a police caution.

To be honest I have no problem with them protesting, I disagree with what they say but they have a perfect right, indeed a duty, to say it. But you interfered with my sausage sandwich and coffee this morning so if it were down to me I'd have invoked the disaster recovery plan, cleared the floor and left you there for a couple of days - let's see how your commitment to the cause is when you're sat in your shit and are hallucinating because of dehydration.

Fucknuggets the lot of you.

(Video of one of the silly twats getting dragged out as soon as I can get YouTube to bleeding well work)

Yeah, that should work.

It would seem that later on this week the City of London is going to be invaded by a rag-tag collection of the great unwashed, eco-nazis, trustafarians and other sundry wastes of DNA all no doubt scrounging the dole (well they are not earning a living or they would be at work on Wednesday wouldn't they?). Naturally as the paedophiles de jour they will be coming to the banks and no doubt shouting at us for daring to have made some money and then, well, losing it.

We have been told that we should not "engage with" the protesters, which is a shame as I was looking forward to getting stuck in and should "call the police if we feel threatened." Yeah, right.

But the best bit is that we have been instructed that in order to keep a low profile we should all dress "casually" for the next few days. Now nobody in The City has worn a tie for years and so being pretty casual its hard to see how much more scruffy we can get. However some of my colleagues in "distressed" jeans and t-shirts were making a fair fist of it this morning.

Quite how this wizard wheeze is supposed to help us avoid the protesters bent on the destruction of capitalism has not really been explained to us, especially when the awkward little green dragon pointed out that we would be walking out of a building with "Banko Di Haggis" written on the front in 20 foot high illuminated letters.

That, combined with our front-of-house security team consisting of Wilf and Albert who have a combined age of 160 and who look like they would have trouble remaining perpendicular to the floor in a modest breeze are not exactly filling me with confidence so I'm planning on bringing in my nunchuks in on Wednesday.

Fred to Darling: "Fuck You"

You know what, if I had managed to negotiate a future income of 25 grand a week, fine wines, country houses and as many girls as my tongue could cope with¹ from a government that could not find its arse with both hands and a map let alone navigate a path to future prosperity I would most certainly be going "Fuck you" when said government came back and said "er, that deal we negotiated, it's really become politically embarrassing so would you mind handing that seventeen million quid back"

Look as you know I work for Banco di Haggis I'm not really meant to comment but let's say that should Sir Fred ever cross my path he'd be getting both nostrils set to "crispy" and not just because he's a fucking knight but he made a great place to work into a laughing stock and every time we get summoned to a manager's pow-wow we're all sat there going "ooooh fuck... here it comes"... and don't get me started on the sodding ABN merger. That said though if the government, B de H's major (only?) shareholder makes such an epic FAIL then one really cannot blame Fred The Shite for taking the cash and running whilst no doubt grinning like a loon at his good fortune.

Mind you we now have to watch NuLab throw good money after bad as they will no doubt in their socialist spite start a court case to get the cash back. When they do I really hope that Fred opens up and spills the whole story of the backroom deals and political chicanery that went on "that weekend" and thus hammers yet another nine incher into the coffin of Gordon the Monocular Cunt.


¹ (c) Ben Elton, back when he was funny.

The New Witches

You know I recon that the paedophiles must be rubbing their hands together with utter glee at the moment as the great British public have found someone to hate even more than them. I am, of course, referring to bankers.

Yes the evil, nasty, corrupt, thieving bastards who have run the economy into the toilet and pocketed huge sums. Lots of finger wagging, tough talking and last week's kangaroo court political theatre courtesy of our lords and masters who were quite happy to take the corporation tax amounting to billions from these evil nasty bankers when their banks were making telephone number profits not to mention trousering 40% of those bonus payments. You didn't hear much clamouring from the fucking socialists then did you?

What pisses me right off is that now I work for the monocular haggis-fucking cunt* who "does not want to run a bank" we have all been told in no uncertain circumstances that there won't be a single penny in bonuses for the likes of code cutting dragons this year. Mind you that did make for a very brief annual appraisal because of course your bonus normally depends on your appraisal rating for the year.

"OK Dracunculus, so your appraisal for this year, lets see now."

"Doesn't really matter a fuck does it, there's no money."

"Er, fair point. Fancy a coffee"

"Sure, you're buying"

So why am I reading that Banco Di Haggis will be paying out massive bonuses? They certainly won't be to me. So which bugger is getting them? Better not be any of the cunts who turned my bank into a laughing stock, made me work the this fucking shower of lefties and mean that I am having to do my own fucking landscape gardening rather than getting a man in.

I suck at landscape gardening.







* Trouble with Clarkson is that he needs to ramp up his swearing content, "One Eyed Scottish idiot" really doesn't cut it when we are talking about Gordo.

Civil Servant Dragon

As I work for Banco Di Haggis, one of the formerly proud and independent Scottish banks ZaNuLabour are about to nationalise, does that make me a government employee; a civil servant if you will.

If so can I have a copper-bottomed final salary pension, Nelson Mandela's birthday off as a holiday, 5 Whitley Days* a year and, if I feel like it, a couple of years on full salary sick pay sitting with my feet up at home because I have "stress". Oh and a straight 9 to 5 with an hour for lunch. And being able to go on strike at the drop of a hat.

I guess there will be some extra forms to fill in but otherwise it sounds like a sweet gig.



* Unrecorded sickness days - named after the brewer Greenall Whitley as they were used when you had a 5 star hangover and work was simply not an option.

Giggle

This is doing the rounds of the trading desks in The City yesterday... enjoy:

Subject: Statement by Soc. gen.

FRIENDS of rogue trader Jerome Kerviel last night blamed his $7 billion losses on unbearable levels of stress brought on by a punishing 30 hour week.

Kerviel hid his November losses in a batch of wonderfully fresh croissant

Kerviel was known to start work as early as nine in the morning and still be at his desk at five or even five-thirty, often with just an hour and a half for lunch.

One colleague said: "He was, how you say, une workaholique. I have a family and a mistress so I would leave the office at around 2pm at the latest, if I wasn't on strike. "But Jerome was tied to that desk. One day I came back to the office at 3pm because I had forgotten my stupid little hat and there he was, fast asleep on the photocopier.

"At first I assumed he had been having sex with it, but then I remembered he had been working for almost six hours."

As the losses mounted, Kerviel tried to conceal his bad trades by covering them with an intense red wine sauce, later switching to delicate pastry horns. At one point he managed to dispose of dozens of transactions by hiding them inside vol-au-vent cases and staging a fake reception.

Last night a spokesman for Sócíété Générálé denied that Kerviel was over worked, insisting he lost the money after betting that the French were about to stop being rude, lazy, and arrogant.

Dans La Merde, encore

Glad that I'm not working for a certain French bank right now.

French bank Societe Generale says it has uncovered "massive" fraud by a Paris-based trader which resulted in a loss of 4.9bn euros ($7.1bn; £3.7bn)

Ooopsie... that's going to result in a large number of very disappointed cheese-eating surrender monkeys come le jour de bonus

So what has our new Nicolas Leeson done to lose so much money? Well from what I can gather from the newswires pretty much the same thing as Nicky boy did in Singapore which brought Barings down and that is writing naked forward contracts. Basically (and simplifying a lot) what he's done is write a contract back in 2007 saying that he's going to buy 100,000 shares in Merde Inc from me at 5 Euros a share on settlement day, January 18th 2008. Now he's betting that the share price for Merde will be above that come the big day, we do our deal and he sells the shares for a profit. Now by writing the contract and selling it he makes a small premium but is now on the hook for a shitload of cash come expiry time. No problem if the stock markets are rising but then all those pesky yanks suddenly couldn't pay their mortgages any more and defaulted with the result that shares in Merde Inc were, well, down the toilette

Of course you would have thought that after the Leeson fiasco there would not be a single bank that would not have reviewed what happened, review and where necessary tightened processes and controls. I was working for a certain American investment bank at the time (the one with the biggest testicles in an organization's logo incidentally) and they sure as hell did; and very nicely I did out of it too with a big fat bonus for working on that project.

I guess over at Soc Gen they just did that stupid Gallic shoulder shrug and went off for a 3 hour lunch.

Won't be having Chateau Lafite with lunch tomorrow I'll wager.

Credit where it's due

And that certainly does not include my credit card company. It's January and hence time in the Dragon's lair to upgrade the PC and, being a modern sort of dragon I find that a credit card is very useful for paying things as it's a bit tricky getting online companies to accept baubles from the hoard. So I go off to my favourite website for all things computery and place an order for a new quad processor screaming death 'pooter of doom.

"Bring, Bring... Hello, look there's a problem with your order, the credit card company have declined your card."

Hmmm... I know it's good for the money and I used it a couple of days earlier, better call the bank. So after much round the houses I get put through to fraud and, apparently, my card has been "compromised" because I used it somewhere (they would not say where) where a card fraud too place. So no money had been taken off my card, it was still in my possession but the bank unilaterally decided to block it without telling me, not even an email.

However they will open it up for this transaction, provided it can go through in the next few minutes, after which my card is toast. Needless to say by this time PC supplier has buggered off to the Horse and Zoophile for a few well earned pints.

So no PC and no credit card.

The following day took the biscuit though, I ring them up to get a new card and it will take "up to 14 days".

"No it won't, I want it in five, tops"

"We can't do that."

"Do you have my account details in front of you. Would you care to take a look at how much I have on deposit with you?"

"Ah"

"So five days then."

"I'm sure in the circumstances we can expedite delivery"

"I know you fucking can because I designed a goodly proportion your card shipping system."

This is becoming more and more common apparently. Credit card companies are getting ticked off with paying for fraud so they are getting really twitchy and will shut down a card when you so much as pay for a bottle of wine in a foreign country.

Time to get a backup card methinks. Might move anyway and take advantage of some of those 0% on balance transfer deals.

Northern on the Rocks

They say that if you owe the bank a thousand pounds you have a problem, however if you owe the bank a hundred thousand pounds the bank has a problem.

The Northern Rock have a really big problem dragon on their hands.