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Barclays closed my mother’s bank accounts because they thought she had died. It was a “clerical error” ie someone had received a death certificate and processed it with about as much rigour as a 2 year old could muster.

They sorted it within 5 days though and paid out compensation and sent her a hamper as an apology. Hopefully they fired the moron who kicked off the process too.

At the end of the day this shit happens but this should trigger a full review and pause all destructive outcomes immediately as mitigation. But being Capita I doubt it will happen.




> Hopefully they fired the moron who kicked off the process too.

God forbit you make such a grave mistake as reading a number off a piece of paper and typing it into a system incorrectly.

It's almost asif the interaction between the systems is the problem and not the human on the end...

It may even have been some sort of "AI" that happened to recognise a letter incorrectly.

It's quick to call for people tp be fired, not that you would ever make a simple mistake.


It’s not a simple mistake. It’s a critically damaging mistake to someone. Any process around such an event requires considerably more competence than what was demonstrated.

In this case their investigation said that the date of birth and last name were matched but the first names were not. This was flagged through by someone who didn’t do their job.

Thats just negligence of duty. I would expect to be minimally fired if I fucked up and hurt someone.


Note to Crimbles employer.

Please be sure to fire them should they mistake one word when reading hundreds of documents a day, they have hereby agreed this is valid cause.


If you get these confused and hurt Robert Smith you should be fired. Stop normalising incompetence!

Robert Michael Smith - 12/10/1954

Gerard George Smith - 12/10/1954


The incompetence here is that a single human being reading this document could make a mistake that would do exactly that.

The human is guaranteed to make a mistake, just as you are.

God forbid your mistake is only the serious matter of embarrassing an elderly person and needing to have your company apologize and make restitution and not putting software on an aircraft that causes it to fly nose first into the ground killing everyone on board.

Would you like me to draw a picture of how the person shouldn't be fired, the entire system should change?


> Hopefully they fired the moron

As you say things happens, so who are you going to fire? It mostly is just a bad coincidences that make these things happens, it mostly is not the guy committing the error who is at fault. I do not want to live in a society where you treat the administrative clerks like you imply.


Bad things should happen at most once. That is the point. To do that you need a culture of improvement which is not evident anywhere I’ve worked in the finance sector.




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