Words To The Wise

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Imagine what it’s like to be a great grandfather and to wake up one morning and find yourself dead. No, that’s not a typo. I meant to say, ‘wake up dead’.

This is exactly what happened to Michael Hughes. Apparently the government department which administers pensions and tax credits here in the UK stopped paying Michael in January of this year.

When he made enquiries about this an official arrived at his home in Preston, Lancashire and informed his wife that he had died in January. Naturally, she was most distressed. Despite the fact that her husband was present at their home, the department insisted that their records were correct, and Michael had to prove his identity before they would accept it.

The couple were eventually given the money owed to them plus a paltry £50 in compensation. I would have thought that an elderly couple who were caused so much stress by a government error should have been awarded a bit more than that.

Apparently a wrong date was entered into their records but I really can’t see how that could happen. There should have been ‘no date’ of death entered at all.

This kind of thing is another sign of beaurocracy gone mad. A man is standing in his home with his wife and has lived there for many years and suddenly he no longer exists according government records. Put this kind of incompetent error with all the instances of lost data containing personal information and it is all very alarming.

It seems to me that as computers have taken over administration and record keeping tasks, the people who enter that data have become more careless. The less they have to do, the less conscientious they become and what may have been minor errors at one time suddenly become huge mistakes where computers are concerned.

Ful story.