- News (190)
- 20/12/2008: April has left the building
- 19/12/2008: Into the darkness
- 18/12/2008: The bombshell
- 17/12/2008: Normal people should not apply
- 16/12/2008: How to advertise for a new headteacher
- 15/12/2008: QCA in chaos; top man resigns
- 13/12/2008: Ofsted has no legal existence
- 12/12/2008: Our mission statement
- 11/12/2008: Ofsted's destruction of documents exposed
- 10/12/2008: Who is in control?
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The Great IT Con Trick
Thursday
An email from our accounts system supplier (whose name I will not reveal because a court case might be pending) saying that because of the forthcoming change in VAT rate they will have to work jolly hard to adjust our system. We don’t have to worry our pretty little heads about it because they will do it all, toiling morning noon and night to achieve this great end, and the cost to the school will be a mere £2800.
Janice and I discussed this and ultimately sent back a long email in which we pointed out that a system which did not operate at the current VAT rate was not fit for purpose, and if they were saying their system was not fit for purpose, then the school would like to have all the money that it had paid for the past five years back please. Alternatively they might change their mind and do the work properly, promptly and for nothing.
As Bodger pointed out, it was very reminiscent of the Year 2000 scam in which the IT “experts” of the west managed to con everyone into thinking that the Millennium Bug would mean that our toasters would not work on January 1st 2000 because the original software had never imagined that the world would survive until 2000.
It was, as we all realised upon the return to work on January 2nd 2000 a completely invented story, but there are software engineers still living in the Bahamas on the profits of that scam.
So now they have another, and Janice and I for two are not standing for it. We sent a second email in the afternoon saying that I write a diary, and for reasons I have never quite understood, an extremely large number of people read the diary. It is only a matter of time (I said) before I reveal the identities of those running the IT scam.
On the way home I discovered that the local kitchen and bathroom store (which is next to the MFI store which is closing down because it has just gone bust – probably due to the activity of the IT consultants who came to fix its computers for the new VAT rate) has a special “three baths for the price of two” promotion.
Turning the radio on I found that everyone phoning in to Drive on Radio 5 was complaining about IT consultants trying to make a fortune out of the rise in VAT rates.