What Has Boris Delivered?

The DeliveryDemon actively dislikes listening to political pomposity. Let’s just get at the text and eliminate the waffle. If you didn’t listen to the PR persiflage, here it is edited to the bare factual bones, along with the DeliveryDemon’s thoughts (in italics) of what was said.

I will be setting out more details in Parliament tomorrow and taking questions from the public in the evening.

Given an offline Parliament there’s really no need to hold this info back

Because although we have a plan, it is a conditional plan.

Fair enough, but I’d expect to see a bit more about checkpoints

And since our priority is to protect the public and save lives, we cannot move forward unless we satisfy the five tests.

• We must protect our NHS. Pious wish, not a test
• We must see sustained falls in the death rate. Question as to how reliable that data is
• We must see sustained and considerable falls in the rate of infection. AFAIK criteria being used to determine infections is still pretty inadequate compared to the range of symptoms being reported so again a question as to how reliable the decision data is
• We must sort out our challenges in getting enough PPE to the people who need it, and yes, it is a global problem but we must fix it. Pious wish again, what actions are proposed?
• And last, we must make sure that any measures we take do not force the reproduction rate of the disease – the R – back up over one, so that we have the kind of exponential growth we were facing a few weeks ago. Pious wish again, what actions are proposed?

These are not tests, they are emotional PR.

And to chart our progress and to avoid going back to square one, we are establishing a new Covid Alert System run by a new Joint Biosecurity Centre. What is this Joint Biosecurity Centre? Sound like the renaming of an existing committee. What’s its remit? Who are the members and what are their qualifications?

And that Covid Alert Level will be determined primarily by R and the number of coronavirus cases.

And in turn that Covid Alert Level will tell us how tough we have to be in our social distancing measures – the lower the level the fewer the measures.This actually contradicts what he said earlier about conditionality. For basic risk management, it makes sense to monitor the effect before confirming a reduction in level.

The higher the level, the tougher and stricter we will have to be.

There will be five alert levels.

Level One means the disease is no longer present in the UK and Level Five is the most critical – the kind of situation we could have had if the NHS had been overwhelmed.

Over the period of the lockdown we have been in Level Four, and it is thanks to your sacrifice we are now in a position to begin to move in steps to Level Three.

And if we are to control this virus, then we must have a world-beating system for testing potential victims, and for tracing their contacts. Forget world beating, it’s not a competition. It needs to be effective. The UK carried out Exercise Cygnus – a pandemic drill – in 2016, and it highlighted all the issues we have seen this year, though the conclusions have never been made public. The Guardian has published a document labelled as the final version of the report and it does not make reassuring reading. It is clear from this that the lessons ‘learned’ use a different understanding of the word ‘learned’ from that understood by most people. The DeliveryDemon has summarised the document in a separate post.

And yet when I look at where we are tonight, we have the R below one, between 0.5 and 0.9 – but potentially only just below one. That’s quite a range for a non-linear variable. Just how many people will understand that distinction?

We now need to stress that anyone who can’t work from home, for instance those in construction or manufacturing, should be actively encouraged to go to work. Not all workplaces are equal in their ability to provide a safe environment. What protection is there for those whose employers are not providing a safe workspace?

And we want it to be safe for you to get to work. So you should avoid public transport if at all possible – because we must and will maintain social distancing, and capacity will therefore be limited. May not be an issue initially but as more sectors are expected to return, just what proportion of the working population work in major centres and / or at a distance from work? Are we expecting gridlock and a pollution hike from car usage? Where will all the parking spaces come from? Travel distance and weather will make walking / cycling impractical for many.

So work from home if you can, but you should go to work if you can’t work from home.

And to ensure you are safe at work we have been working to establish new guidance for employers to make workplaces COVID-secure. Guidelines are fine, enforcement is another matter and whistleblowers tend to suffer.

And when you do go to work, if possible do so by car or even better by walking or bicycle. But just as with workplaces, public transport operators will also be following COVID-secure standards. Enforcement?

And from this Wednesday, we want to encourage people to take more and even unlimited amounts of outdoor exercise.

You can sit in the sun in your local park, you can drive to other destinations, you can even play sports but only with members of your own household. How far is an acceptable drive? What guidelines will police have? How will more isolated communities react to an influx?

You must obey the rules on social distancing and to enforce those rules we will increase the fines for the small minority who break them.

In step two – at the earliest by June 1 – after half term – we believe we may be in a position to begin the phased reopening of shops and to get primary pupils back into schools, in stages, beginning with reception, Year 1 and Year 6. No consideration of country-specific differences in school term dates.

Our ambition is that secondary pupils facing exams next year will get at least some time with their teachers before the holidays. And we will shortly be setting out detailed guidance on how to make it work in schools and shops and on transport.

And step three – at the earliest by July – and subject to all these conditions and further scientific advice; if and only if the numbers support it, we will hope to re-open at least some of the hospitality industry and other public places, provided they are safe and enforce social distancing. Fair enough, but it would have been more sensible to state conditions rather than a date – the date is now firmly implanted in people’s minds.

We are going to be driven by the science, the data and public health. It has long been accepted that ethics have a place in this sort of decision making. Why is it excluded here?

And I must stress again that all of this is conditional, it all depends on a series of big Ifs. It depends on all of us – the entire country – to follow the advice, to observe social distancing, and to keep that R down.

And to prevent re-infection from abroad, I am serving notice that it will soon be the time – with transmission significantly lower – to impose quarantine on people coming into this country by air. NSS. But why just air? And why so late?

And of course we will be monitoring our progress locally, regionally, and nationally and if there are outbreaks, if there are problems, we will not hesitate to put on the brakes. Fair enough but a bit awkward after setting so many dates in people’s minds.

The DeliveryDemon has yet to be persuaded that we have a political class which is capable of managing this country in the interests of its population. After decades of hiding behind the excuses of the market and of the EU, there isn’t the will, the culture, or the competency to make that change.

How NOT to Deliver Customer Service – #Orange

The DeliveryDemon recollects that one of the Scandinavian countries has decided that access to high speed broadband is a necessity of life, possibly even a human right. They obviously don’t have to deal with Orange.

Last night the DeliveryDemon was trying to upload a video to Facebook. She kicked off the upload and went to do something else. Half an hour later, the screen still showed a miniscule thread of blue on the progress bar. A quick check with www.speedtest.net showed a download speed of 0.1Mbps compared to the minimum of 4Mbps Orange claim to deliver. The Delivery Demon picked up the phone and right from the start was faced with the Orange attitude to customer service.

• The IVR scriptwriters must have to sit a stupidity test to qualify for the job.
• First an idiotic statement that a customer whose broadband had failed should check the Orange website – and Orange kept repeating this.
• The error status option announced that Orange knew of no faults on its lines.
• Then an announcement that the helpline was busy, why doesn’t the customer just go away and stop bothering them, or call another day if they really must bother Orange.
• Either the IVR script is a lie or the phone staff lie, because after a 20 minute effort to get through to a person, the response was that no faults were being reported and the helpline wasn’t busy.
• Needless to say, dire music punctuated the IVR idiocies, with choices designed to set teeth on edge and increase the ire of the caller
• There was a particularly obnoxious and recurrent sales pitch trying to plug cinema tickets. Bad enough to be paying for an extremely long call to get Orange to sort its service – definitely NOT the time for Orange to ask the customer to spend more money with them

The phone jockeys are no better than the IVR. The DeliveryDemon has enough knowledge of help desks to know that, if the person you’re talking to can’t explain the effect of what they’re asking you to do, then it’s a bad idea to follow their instructions blindly, especially when their command of the English language is poor and their instructions are delivered in a barely intelligible mumble.

• After being told the router was in another room so it would take a couple of minutes to carry out the requested light status check, the Orange moron didn’t bother to hold on for the few minutes it took so it was back to the Orange IVR hell.
• There was a sudden improvement in the line speed, but all too brief.
• It took 40 minutes to get through to Orange this time
• The so-called technical support proposed a configuration change which he couldn’t explain beyond saying that the result would be loss of broadband for a period he couldn’t specify.
• The supervisor who eventually took over actually tried to claim that there was no such thing as a capacity constraint, that no matter how many users there are of a service, performance will never degrade.
• The supervisor also said they weren’t getting many calls. What’s going on here? Is Orange building in delays to its IVR system in the hope that complaining customers will go away?
• After TWO HOURS on the phone there was still no progress.
• After TWO AND A HALF HOURS on the phone, Orange finally admitted that there was a fault on their line.

Needless to say, this phone marathon did not result in the problem being solved. The phone jockeys aren’t competent to resolve problems, the DeliveryDemon had to wait till next day for a call from an engineer. In the meantime she was stuck with a service so poor she had to resort to her mobile for web access.

Next day the DeliveryDemon waited for the call. The agreed hour passed without any action from Orange so the DeliveryDemon picked up the phone again, only to discover that Orange cannot be bothered to make outbound calls, so the promise of a call from an engineer was based on a lie or incompetence on the part of their helpline, apparently a common occurrence.

What the phone jockey should have said is that, when the Orange service fails, it’s the customer’s job to carry out a number of tests over a 24 hour period before Orange will deign to do anything. So it’s another couple of days of a seriously degraded service which is still crawling along at well below 0.5Mbps most of the time, and yet another stint of battling the Orange IVR customer barrier.

Complaining about this fiasco is even more difficult. Orange won’t accept complaints over the phone, and their customer ‘service’ department don’t do email. The DeliveryDemon supposes they find it easier to claim that snail mail has been lost in the post sent to Orange Customer Support, PO Box 486, Rotherham, S63 5ZX.

There is a disturbing tendency for companies to think it is sufficient to set up a service and walk away. Monitoring and preventative maintenance seem to be a thing of the past, with companies expecting customers to do those particular jobs for them. And companies don’t want to deal with the problems their customers do identify, erecting barriers of IVR delay and complexity, and call centres whose staff lack the basic competencies required to deal with customers, never mind resolve problems. The DeliveryDemon disapproves of this trend, and thinks it’s high time for customers to fight back.