More Cuts

Image via Wikipedia

I may have mentioned a few weeks ago about my bet that redundancies would be announced on January 16th. I was about 5 weeks too early in my reckoning, apparently.
Today 500 reduncancie at Vodafone UK were announced.
The odd thing is that the redundancies have already started, two weeks ago in Vodafone Group. The facilities project manager for the Paddington project, as well as another person in facilities, I heard directly from them, had been made redundant. Very strange, as he was quite good at his job, and genuinely cared. Then I hear that Simon Lewis, the Group Communications Director, has left, as has the head of internal communications, several other people within internal comms, as well as several people in the Corporate Social Responsibility team. Next I hear about some internal audit people gone. But there has been no announcment.
We learned more from Bloomberg than from any communication from the company. Perhaps that is because internal comms is not functioning? Quite possibly. However, it was the CEO's business manager that took over as head of corporate affairs, which absorbs communications, internal and external, and one would think that if she was involved that, naturally, something would be communicated. I have known her since my Japan days, and would give her very high marks when she was the manager for Bill Morrow, our CEO there, as well as Vittorio Colao here.
This reminds me a bit of when Arun Sarin sent David Jones, formerly CEO of Vodafone Netherlands, to Japan to straighten things out as the COO there. Everyone knew, from day one, that he was there to make a show of exerting central group control over Vodafone Japan. He made no attempt to speak to employees, never addressed all employees, even when given the chance at an annual event we held, opting instead to speak on video. He, also, was very quiet right up until the day that he offered all employees the chance to take voluntary redundancy. Twenty five percent of all full-time employees quit the company, receiving quite a good package. Many were the most able people, since the package was so generous that if you were good at your job the temptation was clearly there to take the package and then start at a new job. And since the majority of workers were non-regular employees, so called contractors, the employees really did have the role of driving things, and that was really lost after the 'restructuring'.
He stayed on afterwards, but it was a miserable failure. His people skills, never good in the first place, led to new lows in morale as draconian measures such as 'every trip outside of Japan must first be approved by David Jones' were implemented, but it was never possible to get an appointment to actually get anything approved. I used to send one woman on my team up to his office at 6 pm on Fridays, because we figured out that was the best time, everyone else gone drinking. Also, she was quite cute, which I found really helped, as he wouldn't give me the time of day.
Ironically, it is another former Vodafone Netherlands CEO that is again in the drivers seat. Not knowing Guy Lawrence well, I wouldn't venture to say that he was responsible for this round, since it has apparently been planned for awhile. I would say, however, that Vodafone UK seem to have only two pages in their playbook: Redundancies and Outsourcing.
As a Vodafone Group employee, the complete lack of communication on what, if anything, will happen to us, hasn't been comfortable, and because the rumours didn't specify whether it was Vodafone UK or Vodafone Group or both sorts of employees which would be made redundant, it was very hard to tell where we stand. It still is.
Perhaps the fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) of the past few days are fully justified, as there are always those willing to fall back on tired managment techniques in an effort to show how tough they are, how much 'fat'--as if people were an expendable resource--they can cut. Irony of ironies, these 'change programs' or whatever other current euphemism for large scale firings are called, cost quite a lot in the first year in severance costs. By the end of year two, there is a significant chance that the company has hired other people for the roles that were cut, or is using contractors for it, an option that is actually more expensive in the short, medium, and long-term economically unless your entire business model is based on the outmoded industrial legacy of layoffs, which make much less sense in a business where the number of people tied to the scale of the product being delivered is quite small: Our network still needs to function, our billing still needs to work, our portal still needs to deliver content, our call centre staff have no fewer people today than they did yesterday calling to ask for help. In this sense, we are truly post-industrial, in the sense that we are selling a service where each employee is not necessarily directly tied to the scale of it's use. Unlike auto workers, whose productivity and their use to the company is tied to how many cars they can build, and how many of those cars the company can sell, we don't build anything. Nearly everything has been outsourced, nearly all differentiating factors have been extinguished, and FUD is not a great working environment.
Back at group, the randomness of some of the trickle of redundancies I have heard about does create a fear.
I shall be interested in whether our hermit leader explains the grand strategy he has been working on. People who actually know anything are being incredibly tightlipped.
Fuk this FUD. Not only did 500 people get fired, but our volleyball club members, most of them Vodafone UK people, were in no mood for games tonight, so it got cancelled.

Enough!

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I have a bank account with a certain large bank's Jersey branch. The reason that people usually bank in Jersey is to somehow avoid the taxman, and I am no different. Because of my tax status, I am allowed (supposedly) to keep a very small percentage of my taxes back from the UK tax man. In order to take advantage of that privelege, however, my money needs to not be repatriated to the UK, which means that it needs to be payed directly into an offshore account. I turns out that, even with this mechanism in place, I had trouble with making my refund claim this year, but generally it is worth doing.

My bank, like many banks, seems to have a really arrogant feeling towards it's customers: They started to charge me £20 per month about two years ago, simply for the privelege of having an account, and their charges for certain transactions are silly. However, because my choice of offshore banks that do business in pounds sterling, that are part of the UK banking system, and therefore can be used for direct debits and whose debit card can easily be used is limited, and once you have 16 direct debits set up, it takes something reasonably major to push you toward change.

It has been building up for a while, but yesterday was the last straw, and this camel's not having any more of it. I am so hacked off with them that I was literally speechless yesterday.

My discontent is not a new thing. Firstly, they sent me a premier account card a couple of years ago, which had some additional benefits advertised, like a premier credit card with a better rate of interest, a better rate on a morgtage, access to lounges (which I actually used in Istanbul), and free transfers between accounts in different countries. All sounds great, right? Well, last year I needed to deposit some money in the account in order to cover some direct debits that were coming up. I asked them how I could quickly do that, and they said, 'mail us the cheque, and we will credit it to your account in 5 working days.' The problem was that the debits were coming up.
'So,' I asked, 'do you have a facilitiy for an overdraft?'
'No, sir, I am sorry, but that is only available to premier accounts.'
'Well,' says I,' I have one of them. '
'I'm sorry sir, but your account is not a premier account.'
'Then why does my debit card say 'premier' on it?' ask I.
'I don't know sir, but your account is not a premier account.'
'Well it *was* a premier account, and if it is no longer one, why wasn't I told?'
'I'm sorry, but all I know is that it isn't a premier account, and so your query about an overdraft will not be possible. Can I help you with anything else today?'
'Yeah, you can help me by giving the phone to your manager. I am not happy with your inability to answer my simple question: WHY IS MY ACCOUNT NO LONGER A PREMIER ACCOUNT?'
'I'm sorry sire, but my manager is not available. Would you like someone to call you back?'
'Yes. When?'
'Within 4 working days.'
'Four working days!?'
'Yes sir.'
'Are you taking the mickey?'
'No, sir. That is the SLA (he actually said that) for our response.'
'Right. So, I can expect someone to call me after I actually have a problem? Here I am calling you to try to figure out a way to either get money in the account or get an overdraft arranged, and you will have someone call me in four days...not bloody good enough.'
'I will mention your displeasure sir. Have a nice day.' (I don't remember if he actually said that, but his generally chirpy demeanour would be consistent with that).

No one ever called me back.

Fast forward to a week ago when I was in Costco buying some stuff. I tried my debit card, and it didn't work. I thought this might happen, as they had sent me a new card, and the old one was meant to expire at the end of the month. Never mind that it was only the 29th. I had the new one ready, and tried that one. I was told that 'the pin number is incorrect.' See, this was actually after I had tried the new one and gotten the same message. After I had called the bank and been assured that was just because they hadn't switched over to my new card yet, and when my old one expired my new one should work with the same PIN number. So, here I am at Costco, with five people in line behind me, and I had to run over to the ATM and use my Amex card to get some cash, with lots of unhappy people glaring at me. When I got home I called the bank and had a conversation along the lines of this:
'Yes, I received a new debit card, and when I put in the PIN number it doesn't work.'
'But it should work, sir.'
'Yes, but it doesn't.'
'Well, sir, would you like us to send a new PIN number?'
'How long will that take?'
'Five to seven working days.'
'Well, I think you can do better than that. I don't want to wait 5-7 working days to have access to my own money.'
'We can send it by DHL, but there is a charge for that.'
'I don't think so. I know my PIN, and it is not working with this card. That is a problem with your systems, and there is no reason why I should pay anything extra for you to sort this problem as quickly as possible.'
'Well, sir, we can open an investigation, and if it turns out that it was our fault, we will refund the money.'
'And how long does the investigation take?'
'Two to three working days.'
'Right, so here is what you will do: You will start the investigation, and at the same time send the PIN by DHL.'
'Yes, we will do that, but please realise that there will be a charge for the DHL until the investigation is finished.'
'Fine. Since I am absolutely sure that you will find that you screwed up.'
'I screwed up sir?' he asked indignantly.
'Not you personally, your bank.' Plonker. What other meaning could there be, and is he not aware that he represents his employer?
'Can I help you with anything else today, sir?'
'No.'

Fast forward to Thursday. I received a call from a very apologetic woman from the bank who assured me that they were doing everything possible to rectify the situation, and as a token they would credit £25 to my account for telephone charges. I said that all I wanted was access to my money, and she assured me that I would be receiving the new PIN by the next day.

I did indeed receive the PIN by Friday, but was in London all day, so I didn't have a chance to check it, and preferably change the PIN to a preferred PIN. I tried that yesterday at Tesco. Can you guess what happened? It didn't work!

I called when I got home, and was told that there was a general problem with PINs not correctly matching to newly issued cards, and to please destroy my card, because a new card and PIN number would be sent out immediately. How soon, I asked, is immediately? Five to seven working days. No, you will send it by DHL and you will refund me the cost. Ok, right, can you tell me the reason why we should pay the cost? Because it is the result of your mistake, and it has caused me to not have access to my funds for a week now. Right, ok, I will put that down. Big of you. You might also add that I will seriously be considering moving my account to another bank. Well, sir, that is your right. Yep. And since I am not insane, which I would have to be to continue to do business with your bank, I will be very carefully weighing my options.

What I didn't say was that after they started charging £20 a month, I got upset and had opened an account at one of the competitors, where they don't charge that amount, and who have a much better intergration of their offshore account with their UK-based branches, so depositing cheques and so forth is much simpler. I had never activated it, because of the abovementioned pain of moving all of my direct debits. Yesterday was it, though. I moved my salary to pay into the new account, and changed without much hassle three of the 16 direct debits. I will be making more phone calls and visists on Monday to change the remaining ones. I also moved money into the account so that I could use the debit card. That cost me £25, but I figured I was ok, at least I had access to my money.

By the way, there is still a £17 charge on my account for the DHL fee. Oh, and the £20 monthly charge was charged yesterday.

And bankers wonder why they garner so much hate.

Snow and Picture

It snowed today, virtually bringing the UK to a halt. It isn't a major storm on the scale of some of the ones I saw when I went to school in Minnesota, but there is a lot less infrastructure for dealing with it. So, I decided to work from home, and Christopher's school was cancelled.
Separately, I got some gift certificates from my company for doing above the expected level on the Paddington project, and bought myself a really nifty Nikon D40 digital SLR.
So, I went out for a walk and took a bunch of pictures. I am still figuring out how to set the aperture and shutter speed, but the great thing about digital cameras is that they don't cost much to learn. Anyway, here is one of my first attempts to use it.