Is Honesty the Best Policy When the Computer Says No?
What would Robbie say?
As a cashier’s daughter, I was brought up to be honest. The only qualification for dealing with cash is honesty, my dad used to say, quoting Robbie Burns’ verse in A Man’s a Man for A’ That, “The honest man, tho’ e’er sae poor, Is king o’ men for a’ that.”
At a young age, I was more impressed by Dad’s seemingly magical ability to do complex sums in his head and produce the right answer. Nowadays, I use a calculator, and round off to the nearest pound, but his principles have stuck: double check any financial paperwork to avoid nasty surprises.
Now, for several years I have belonged to a council-run scheme that negotiates a collective discount on residents’ gas and electricity bills. Every year, the council switches suppliers, and takes care of the paperwork involved — or in this day and age the job of transferring residents’ digital records.
So, when the council switched suppliers yet again, I checked my final electricity bill against the final meter reading and worked out that I was in credit by £183.
Sure enough, an email from the former supplier informed me that a refund of £183 was on the way. Correct. But the very next day, another email informed me that the refund would be £60. Incorrect. A couple of weeks later, both refunds appeared in my bank account. Definitely incorrect.
When he wrote his paean to “honest poverty”, Robbie Burns lived in the world of the printed word. What would he write today, faced with the blunderbuss of the computer says no?
For, as an ex-customer of that electricity supplier, I no longer have online access to my former account. Their website rejects my account number and password. The council transferred my data to a new supplier and that’s that.
In normal circumstances, I would telephone to report the mistake. However, all companies seem to have seized on Covid as an excuse to cut back on customer service, and I refuse to talk via a chatbot or wait 30 minutes in a queue while a recorded voice assures me that all their operators are busy “helping other customers”.
My windfall is undeserved. However, what if the company had made a mistake in the opposite direction and owed me that money? What hurdles would I have to jump over to report a computer error and retrieve what was legitimately mine? What if I were newly unemployed, sunk in depression, and living on the breadline?
Thinking of those on the breadline, it seems fair to donate half to a food bank and invite a friend for a drink with the remainder. We can raise a glass to Robbie, a flawed, romantic radical who championed the cause of the common man in an unfair world.
