Category Archives: Embarrassing Trainwrecks

Another error from a wunch of bankers…

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The Register has this interesting story… a man in Georgia USA received a letter from his bank shortly after he closed his account with them. He believed he had cleared any outstanding charges so was a little bit surprised when he received a letter from the bank insisting he owed them $211 trillion dollars. This is just over 23 times the national debt of the United States (as at 4th Dec 2007).

The letter received by the unfortunate man also informed him that the information regarding his debt would be passed to a credit scoring agency. As this is apparently an automated process the ex-account holder has resigned himself to it appearing on his credit report at some point in the future.

The bank has apologised and has assured the recipient that his details have not been passed on. The bank’s stated root cause for this error was a “word processing error” (how quaint, they seem to still write each individual letter by hand. No mail merge?) and that this was an isolated case.

There is no information whether the poor recipient of this letter has considered suing the bank for the shock and awe that their letter may have caused, or the potential damage to his credit rating if the bank bungles the fix of their bungling.

At $211 trillion dollars this counts as a trainwreck, and is the counterbalance to the story we had a while ago about the Australian man and his uncontrolled overdraft.

ahem… Information Quality problem with the trains…

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http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/13/eurostar_glitch/

Again culled from el Reg, here’s an example of an information quality problem that prevents a process (a very trivial process) from being completed.

It seems that the on-line booking system for the EuroStar train linking the UK with Europe doesn’t recognise the existence of the 29th of February 2008. As the leap year day is the day when women can traditionally propose to their partners (as opposed to dropping less and less subtle hints about the need for a big diamond on their finger which happens the other 3 years out of 4) this might pose a problem for some.

Why is this an IQ Trainwreck?…

  • Well, it involves trains so it is just too easy an association to make.
  • A process has been (apologies for this one) derailed by poor quality information (or master data or a poorly designed/implemented data quality check)
  • The comments from the readers of the post sum up the likely responses of people encountering the problem..
    • This is a trivial bug, if that’s how careless they are do I really want to travel by train?
    • They obviously don’t want my business, I’ll fly instead
    • Good grief…. how embarassing for them.

Apparently the Eurostar site isn’t the only one to have this issue… but it is the one that makes the best IQ Trainwreck.

What’s in a number?

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From the ever vigilant The Register comes a story of a man who was detained by authorities for 50 days due to an error on the part of his ISP in identifying who had used a particular IP address to upload satirical images of a revered Indian (as in sub-continent, not Native American) leader of the 17th Century.

Details of the story can be found here

This is, to my mind, an IQ trainwreck as it caused a man to be deprived of his liberty for 50 days.

Also, the exact same information from ISPs is being used by law enforcement and Recording Rights groups to find terrorists and filesharers, so problems with the accuracy of the information will lead to wasted law enforcement efforts (terrorism) or defamation (Recording Rights groups accusing you of downloading when you didn’t).

Once the legal system becomes an ‘information consumer’ for this type of data then the standard of care and expectation of quality and accuracy must increase.

oops Amazon did it again…

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Also from “The Register”, it appears that Amazon have again created ‘interesting’ relationships in their data that have had uncomfortable results for their customers.

We previously reported on the IQ trainwreck that occured when Amazon sent email recommendations for sex toys to people who’d never bought such items from Amazon. Today they seem to have gone one better with a search for “Spiderman Watch” on Amazon.co.uk returning a quite prominent sex toy.

The Register posted their story at 15:03 GMT+1 today, and at 16:14 this correspondent found the same item, this time TOP of the search results.

I’ve uploaded a screen grab of my search results and clicking here will bring you to my search string… rather than risk offending readers the screen grabs are linked to rather than displayed as thumbnails.

Spiderman Watch Search Result (Image not presented for fear of offending)

As Amazon uses linkages within its data to present recommendations, purely in the interests of research I followed a few links on the product page for the unexpected result to see what might have lead to the association being created.

Under the product detail for the sex toy Amazon proudly lists that customers who bought items like this also bought “Spiderman – The Animated Series” and a number of innocent children’s toys.

The sex toy and a number of others of similar kind (which revealed themselves when I clicked on the producer name) appear to be categorised “Toys and Games” in the Amazon database… which means that they may (indeed WILL) appear in other searches. For example, if you search for “Rabbit” under the “Toys and Games” category, look what appears in the “New Arrivals” section on the left hand side…

Link to Screenshot of Search results for ‘Rabbit’ in ‘Toys and Games on Amazon’.

Further investigation indicates that the root cause here is the nature of the classification and tagging of these particular ‘toys’ in the Amazon database… searching for “Rabbit” under “Toys & Games/Dolls & Accessories” produces an interesting result on the first page… Example of classification/metadata issue

Why is this an IQ Trainwreck?

  1. Reputational Damage – The fact that the item is returned in a search for a children’s product is damaging to Amazon’s reputation as a retailer. As the story has appeared on The Register, it is possible that a ‘slow news day’ will result in it appearing in local nor national press in the UK (and it has been mentioned here).
  2. Derived from information – Amazon search results are returned from Amazon’s database… somewhere in the database a relationship has been created between the term ‘spiderman watch’ and this particular sex toy. This may have happened by accident or through malicious intent on the part of an individual. However the fact that it can happen suggests a lack of control over the information (should it be ‘consistent’ for a search for a children’s watch to return a sex toy? What controls might Amazon consider to improve the quality of their searches and prevent possibly inappropriate content from being shown to children?)
  3. Information is of poor quality – it fails to meet or exceed expectations.

Personally, I wouldn’t want to have to explain to any kids what those particular toys were for.

I am reminded of a story I heard about a particular court case in Ireland a few years ago where a children’s party hire shop sued a classified directory enquiries provider for listing them in the Adult party hire section of the directory….

It’s not only Amazon who have pricing trainwrecks…

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Courtesy of the correspondents over at TheRegister.co.uk, we have the story of Woolworths.co.uk who advertised a childrens book for a somewhat astronomical price.. stg£99 million (and 99p) and then charged £2.74 delivery as well…

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/16/rather_expensive_book/

This is the counter-weight to Amazon’s underpriced TV issues mentioned here previously.

The error is now fixed on the Woolworths site…

A minor trainwreck… the importance of quality info on live TV

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From the blog section of the Irish Times…

http://www.ireland.com/blogs/presenttense/2007/10/08/youve-won-nothing/

 ‘Tubridy Tonight’ is a popular weekly TV show on Ireland’s national broadcaster RTE.  On Saturday last, the presenter was giving away a holiday to Chicago along with an amount of spending money. A caller to the show simply had to answer a question correctly… the question was “Which actress won an Oscar for her role in the movie Chicago?”.

The caller answered “Renée Zellwegger”, one of the female leads in the 2002 movie and was congratulated on giving the correct answer (and got a fanfare from the house band). A few seconds later the hapless presenter had to correct himself (and the caller) and inform her that she had given the wrong answer and hadn’t actually won the prize but had received a lesser consolation prize instead.

My guess is that the presenter, perhaps believing the question to be so trivally easy that no-one could get it wrong, went on auto-pilot and didn’t perform the much needed vital check of accuracy before opening his mouth and putting at least one foot firmly in….

The lesson… a control check on the quality  of information (such as accuracy or ‘correctness’) needs to not just exist but needs to be actually operated in order to prevent embarrassment, injury or loss.  Having the mechanisms of a control in place but not operating it is a recipe for a trainwreck.

For the record, both Catherine Zeta-Jones and Renée Zellwegger were nominated for Oscars for Chicago. Zeta-Jones won for Best Supporting Actress. Zellwegger missed out for Best Actress, but did win a Golden Globe.

“Problems with the quality of the data” cause process traffic jam

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Hundreds of Irish motorists  (this author included) have technically driving uninsured because of delays with the National Car Test (the Irish equivalent of the UK MOT). This was reported by the Sunday Business Post on the 19th of August.

The Irish Road Safety Authority has confirmed that some motorists may not have been informed that their car was due its NCT. In Ireland you can’t insure your car with out a valid NCT certificate and not having an NCT certificate that verifies your vehicle’s roadworthiness could invalidate your insurance policy.

The root cause is identified by the company that operates the testing in Ireland as being “problems with the quality of the data” which resulted in them not getting details of all vehicles due for testing.

 Apparently the first that the company that adminsters the NCT knew of the problem was when people started to phone them asking them where their reminder letters where and seeking to make appointments.

The knock-on affect is that there is now a back log of a number of weeks for an appointment to get an NCT test. The Sunday Business Post refers to the testing centre in Donegal with a wait period of 6 weeks. My experience in the South East of Ireland has been a wait of over 2 months.

The NCT certificate on our car expired in July but due to my wife’s persistence on the phone we eventually got a test date in late August. I wonder if we would be insured if we were in a crash during that month?  Strictly speaking we would not have been as the vehicle would not have been certified as road-worthy.

In Ireland it is an offence to drive a vehicle that doesn’t have a valid NCT certificate. This offence carries with it a penalty of 5 ‘points’ on your drivers licence. 12 points results in your licence being taken away from you.  The impacts of this IQ Trainwreck were potentially significant.

IQ Trainwreck in Australian bank gives man a AU$11m overdraft

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The Register picked up on this story on Friday. Their headline describes it as a ‘scam’, but one of their commenters correctly points out that this is probably a failure of a business rule in one of the bank’s processes which resulted in Mr Victor Ollis running up an overdraft of AUS$11 million (approx US$9 million).

According to Australian news site News.com.au,

Mr Ollis had an automatic transfer facility with the bank, which topped up his business account using funds from his personal account.

The transfers should have been stopped after his personal account was overdrawn in February 2004, the court heard yesterday.

But due to an error at Westpac, his account continued to be replenished – only with money “from the bank’s own pocket”.

Between June and December 2005, Westpac honoured cheques totalling about $11 million written by Mr Ollis.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that

Over the next seven months the NSW businessman siphoned close to $11 million in Westpac’s own funds into his own affairs, taking advantage of a recurring technical error that topped up his business account.

(emphasis added by the IQ Trainwrecks team).

The bank’s own legal representative is quoted by news.com.au as  saying

“A human error meant the facility kept working, except it was drawing money from the bank’s own pocket”.

The Australian Courts have found against Mr Ollis and his partner and he has been ordered to repay WestPac AU$14,692,968.03, the original AU$11m plus interest, but that may not be the end of it as there is still to be a hearing on court costs for the case.

Of course, as Mr Ollis has pointed out, he doesn’t have long to live and the Bank may not get anything.

So, what happened here?

Money was being transferred from Account A to Account B. Account A became overdrawn. The money transfer kept running. The expectation that Mr Ollis had that the transfers would not run if he had no money in the account was not met. Unfortunately Mr Ollis formed the expectation that he could keep spending the money that was being transferred into his account as it was the Bank’s error.

Who loses here?

Everyone. The bank has the bad publicity of a court case arising out of a series of internal errors. Mr Ollis and his partner face significant bills at the end of this to repay the money. Should some or all of the money go unpaid, the Bank’s customers and shareholders will bear the brunt of lower profits and/or higher bank charges as a result.

Given the amount of money involved, the likely simplicity of the root cause and the significant impacts on Mr Ollis, the bank, its shareholders and its customers, this is a definite candidate for an IQ Trainwreck.

Oh, and before we forget, this is a case of a customer who decided he didn’t want to pay the money back and tried to fight the situation. If the source of the error was a systems failure or even ‘human error’ there is a good chance that other customers might have been affected, albeit in a much smaller (and quieter) way.

Store offers TVs at £0.49

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The BBC reported in September 2005 that a well known UK retailer was caught out when a technical error led to customers attempting to buy televisions from its website for £0.49 (less than a US$1.00 then).

Why is this an IQ Trainwreck?

Why is this a trainwreck?—The store was able to repudiate the transactions because of the huge discrepancy between the offer price and the actual price. It was too good to be true. However, the reputational loss was significant. Argos was the butt of jokes for weeks and customers’ trust in their pricing was badly affected. It is easy to conceive that a simple piece of validation could have prevented the problem. “If the offer_price is less than 50% of actual_price then query value”

Hardware horrors…

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The Irish Examiner newspaper carries this story in the Business section of its website today. A UK hardware chain is having to rebate customers following an ‘administrative error’ and what the Examiner describes as a ‘system failure’ over the weekend.

Customers who paid by credit or debit cards found themselves being charged multiple times for the transactions resulting in some of them being put overdrawn on their bank accounts. The chain in question is refunding the customers their money, but given the impact this could have had on customer with direct debit payments for utility bills or mortgages the impact to customers is potentially significant. Not quite a full-on trainwreck but one might say that some of the carriages were left behind at the last station.

This would appear to be case of duplicated data (or duplicated submission of data) indicating a weakness in the processes and controls for managing information, which has resulted in an information experience for customers that failed to meet their expectations.

 While customers are being rebated, spare a thought for the additional administrative costs incurred by the hardware store in tracking down the affected customers, calculating the amount of overcharge, contacting the customer, processing the refund, arguing with the customer about the impact on their credit rating because the direct debits for their phone bill, credit card and mortgage all failed because there was no money in the account (note – there is no information to suggest that this has actually happened, but it is a risk and would be a long phone call). These are the costs of scrap and rework in the information process. Payment by electronic card (credit card or debit card) is a ‘information age’ payment process and is fraught with the risks of non-quality of information fromf poorly managed processes.

Buying tools by debit card… so good they billed you twice, no.. three times… no wait that could be four times….