The OCR statement is confusing. It speaks of a customer manager trying to pass the buck down the line as quickly as possible
Though they knew this information when they sent it to the author, presumably it would be laborious to manually associate the same information with each returned letter (one would have to look it up anyway), so they probably print the data on the letter that may someday be returned, to allow quick lookup in the event it is returned.
It's equivalent to a conversation ID and interface crafted to avoid lookups, making this letter exchange idempotent, which I very much appreciate.
Why it was not requested to be returned is beyond me, but likely all such letters contain this.
Finding out it was real was a mixture of hilarious and sobering.
More likely is that whenever they print OCR'able numbers / barcode/ whatever, they assume that a person is going to return it -- and the special case of 'we only get returned letters when the delivery has failed and nobody has opened the envelope' escaped the testing.
It’s a form of tax that pays for public service broadcasting, including radio stations.
It's a form letter. In the event it's returned you want the data, regardless.
> A Licensing officer may call at your property not to collect the letters but to check that you are not watching a TV.
and
>...Cas Scott has said that the letters are not sought by TVL/BBC agents who make street visits.
Like, they show up at your home and ask to physically view your TV to make sure you aren't watching TV! It's so incredibly bonkers to me, I'm laughing out loud at work at the mental image!
Never change, UK, never change.
It seems the most likely explanation to me!
> When the film opens, [Kempton Bunton] is refusing to pay his TV licence fee on a technicality, since he can only get ITV because he’s removed “the BBC coil” from inside the set. It’s all part of his “Free TV for the OAPs” campaign, but despite his well-meaning demeanour, he serves time at Her Majesty’s expense for refusing to pay up to Auntie Beeb.
As of 2024 you pay even if you have no tv, which means the overhead is probably near zero, as you already have lists of where people live.
I don't own a television and don't want one (it's a waste of life). I get sent letters all the time. Last year I had an "inspector" turn up who was told to "fuck off", managed to gain entry to the apartment block and then came and knocked on my internal door and refused to show ID, clearly because he was an intimidating arsehole and didn't want to be called on it. He was told to "fuck off" again and told me he'd come back with the police if I didn't let him in. I told him I'd ram the bike handle up his arse if he came back.
Put a complaint in and they replied asking for my license number. Just like the stuff in that article - didn't even read it properly. Absolute clowns.
The tv license collection agency employs more than a 1000 people.
And this is in spite of the fact that nearly every household has to pay that €18.36 per month.
In my seven years of living in the UK, I’ve paid the TV licence for two years, and had one visit (who I shut the door on).
I think there also were some large cases where a company who owned a car fleet had to pay for the car radios.
Publicly funded media is a great thing to have, and the intention of TV License is to fund it independently from interference from the government of the day. In Australia there’s frequently stories about governments cutting ABC funding, which TV License is supposed to avoid entirely.
But the implementation in practice just sucks. It’s baffling to think of how much money is wasted on administering this additional tax program, sending out all these pretty aggressive letters, maintaining the website, and paying the real “inspectors” to knock on peoples doors.
the absurd part is restricting that tax to only people who watch TV, and trying to do surveillance and enforcement to determine whether or not somebody is eligible for a TV tax.
[1] Big parts of our public television suck. But ARTE is awesome!
* Borgen
* Occupied
* Mit offenen Karten
* Karambolage
* …
----
Edit: I will share what I think is a nice a little counterpoint story here, from a business that is clearly still interested in understanding. I sent Lego an email a while ago:
I'm just wondering if you're able to tell me what the
tune is that the Lego Primo musical camel plays in set
number 2007. It's a set from 1998. We have the camel and
it plays a nice tune, but no-one seems to know what it is!
Thanks for getting in touch with us.
This is a really really really and I mean really interesting
question you got there for us. I have checked with all the
resources I have and come to a possible conclusion.
The Musical Camel – which in Denmark actually is called
‘PRIMO Dromedar'. 1st theory is that, One DUPLO-designer
says that the melody was composed by the designer that
created the camel but no one remembers the name who created
the Musical Camel. Another thing is, one of the engineer once
had a musical box that had the same melody but he is no
longer with us anymore and cannot provide us the answer.
I am so sorry that, at the end of the day I cannot provide
you with any name to the title. But I hope the facts can
make a good story for you to tell your friends.Just the thought of this is funny. What kind of uniforms do TV Officers wear? Do they get to carry a weapon? What happens if they find you watching a TV?
Amazing.
I found out that in my country you can have a third-party, approved technician come to your house to disable the tuner portion of your TV so that you would not have to pay any television license. Around this time analog broadcasting was already being phased out or had already completely shut down in my country. And although some kind of digital broadcasting over air-waves exists to replace it, most people do not use that. Instead, you'll typically buy a subscribtion via cable or via IPTV or via sattelite, all of which come with a separate box that plugs into your TV via HDMI instead of relying on the tuner in your TV, even if that tuner can decode digitally broadcast radio signals. So the tuner in the TV was not serving much of a purpose anyway, even if I'd ever want to use the TV as a TV.
I paid a technician a bit of money to come disable the tuner for me in my newly bought 55" LED TV. I was imagining that he'd be opening the TV and carefully removing some essential part. What he actually did was take a plier and break the input for the tuner and then put a small piece of tape over it. Simple solutions, I guess. Then, I think I also got them to write a letter for me confirming that the tuner had been disabled.
It cost me a little bit of money, but not too much. Less than paying the TV license fee for that and subsequent years I was staying in that house anyway.
These days, I still have the TV. I put it in my grandfather's house a few years ago so he could use it. He already pays TV license fee and has a digital receiver. It has HDMI out which goes in to the TV. So he is not inconvenienced by the broken tuner input of the TV either, just like I expected back then that this disabling of the tuner would never be a problem even if I ever wanted to use it as a TV.
It does seem kind of silly now, that I paid someone to come break the input for a portion of the TV that was never going to be needed even if you wanted to use it as a TV. But I still think it was worth it, and that it saved me from worrying about inspections. Even though no inspection ever happened at the house either back in the days where I was using it as a monitor for my computer.
We have this ridiculous situation where I'm not required to pay (so I don't), yet the TV licensing people are allowed (required?) to send me junk mail week after week trying to trick me into thinking I do need to pay them.
It's just not enforced. Also the party platform wasn't to get rid of the license system but to encrypt the broadcast signal so that only willing NHK viewers would pay for the license.
I'm actually totally stumped by the whole thing. OCR doesn't even make sense, because OCR is terrible at handwriting generally. With forms they usually require you to write block letters and numbers inside of a kind of separate grid for each field. And maybe fill in some bubbles too. Anything anywhere on the page outside of the form fields is ignored.
I'd find it far more plausible that they print all letters, those including forms and not, on the same template, and that returned forms get some kind of bar code or status stamped on the bottom upon being received, so they need to keep it empty for that. Kind of like how US envelopes get a little bar code printed on them by post office sorting. I have no earthly idea whether that's closer to the real reason though.
> colour TV: £169.50 per year; monochrome TV: £57.00 per year; blind people: 50% discount
People who can't see their color TV at all pay more than people who can but have an old black-and-white one?
If they catch you watching TV they will report you for a £1000 fine and a criminal record. Failing to pay it will land you in prison.
I spent years without a license, you don't need one for YouTube and Netflix. I unplugged the aerial wire. You do need it for any live TV or BBC catch up TV. I got visited once during that time and he kept asking to come in, I kept telling him I didn't need to let him. He kept asking what I watch on TV, I told him politely, that was none of his concern.
If they suspect you are harboring an illegal TV then they will come back with a warrant and the police!
"Any services from the BBC" means any. TV broadcast, radio broadcast, or internet streaming. And because the actual intention was to make everyone pay, the law is written so you have to pay if you could receive one. If you have a computer and the Internet, you could receive internet streaming.
And then you have more stupid rules, like even though they're collecting a tax, they're not tax collectors so they don't have any authority to come into your house, so they invent weird ways to detect if you have a TV or not.
Presumably a left wing government would remove all this stuff and just make it a tax.
There is plenty to criticise but the weird ring fenced tax that we pay is incredible value for money (films, tv, web, journalism for the price of Netflix
They kept asking you to essentially call a function on the actual public api and you kept on ignoring the error messages.
If you are tempted to feel smugly superior remember they were paid for their responses whereas you wasted your own time.
I once hand delivered some paperwork (I was running late) to HR rather than using the inter office mail service. I asked them about it, they told me "Oh you must be Mathew..." I was HR famous. They didn't actually mind, the company was so process driven that having to visually double check my paperwork was just how things were.
Later on they decided to repaint the entire office because we had slightly changed the colors of our logo.
Not long after painting I jokingly put up a piece of paper on a huge white wall that read "This space intentionally left blank." The movers who took down the art put up the art on that wall again, and spaced it evenly ... around my note.
It stayed there for at least 4 years before we left for a new building.
Process...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKpD-KkaBHc
We never worked it out.
I think "do not write below this line" is just another one of those things, it makes the letter seem like its part of Official Serious Bureaucracy.
They get increasingly threatening and aggressive. I'd guess that the OCR code scanning is to confirm that he's read the letter and adjust the hostility in the next letter appropriately.
There is some kind of 'detector' mentioned online that can apparently look at a window and see the light of a TV flickering on the glass! Judges buy this bs and issue warrants to search.
I've given this a lot of thought in the past. The best I could come up with is that "legally blind" could still allow for someone with _very poor_ (colour) vision...
That is true, but OCR is nonetheless used in many situations like this, for example at the postal office (the US postal office started doing this in 1965). Even if they can recognize only a fraction of the letters, it is a huge savings in terms of processing costs. The remaining will be handled manually anyway.
We've been working remote now since the beginning of covid, but our office is still open for anyone who wants to use it. I visited earlier this summer and my jacket was gone. I asked our office assistant about it and she had apparently just recently moved it to a lost and found box, noting that it had been there as long as she had.
I told her the story about how the coat had followed me across two offices and twelve years. She seemed unentertained and asked me not to put it back. It's been moved to my desk for the time being.
I offered to provide some expert help on a set they were designing once and they immediately put me in direct contact with the designer in Billund. No bureaucracy.
Why can't more companies be this good? I've been trying for years to get into one Google account of mine :(
> the law is written so you have to pay if you could receive one.
That's not true. You're allowed to own equipment capable of receiving licensed broadcasts, all that matters is that you don't.
Of course, that still doesn't make sense because to the best of my knowledge you don't need a license of any kind to listen to the radio.
Anyway, perhaps blind people want to listen to the TV. There are a lot of programs that could make sense even if you can hear but not see them.
I've corresponded with the civil service a few times recently and the service now is shite.
[1]: https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2024/10/who-are-the-...
That's not true, according to https://www.gov.uk/find-licences/tv-licence.
> You do not need a TV Licence to watch:
> • streaming services like Netflix and Disney Plus
> • on-demand TV through services like All 4 and Amazon Prime Video
> • videos on websites like YouTube
> • videos or DVDs
Now I'm forced to pay for old sitcoms, astrology shows, soccer stuff and other useless things I don't watch anyways...
Post offices may make notes such as "undeliverable" on a piece of mail. The sending company may make changes to their mailers which must be hand-updated on pre-printed cards. In both cases, writing below the line may obscure which ID had its letter rejected by the Post or which IDs have not had updated mailers sent yet.
By the time the recipient of the letter receives it, they may write below the line as much as they like, as the instructions have already been followed by those they were intended for.
I would not expect first line support to be aware of this.
So I would assume that the uptick is caused by you moving somewhat up in you career so you deal with such BS systems more often.
On the other hand, the approach with explicit markers in the email is reliable. Alternative is some bunch of ad-hoc rules that will extract the actual reply from the reply, which has a lot of edge cases (which for some systems even extend to edge cases that involve the MIME envelope, not the message text itself).
> I am still not satisfied. If I send a letter back to TVL/BBC, and they scan the number at the bottom, it will generate the same information as they have already got; so, what's the point?
But that's the happy case, when nobody has written anything there to interfere with the OCR.
If the number cannot be read, then the document cannot be automatically associated with the residential address it pertains to; someone will have to deal with it manually.
It got turned into a commentary on corporate responsibility (everyone likely thought "I don't know why this is here, but it's not my responsibility to check"), workplace communication (between the movers and your company), psychological inertia [1] (at some point, people would've been surprised and bothered if the paper wasn't there anymore), and much more. There's at least a months-long art study project potential in this!
I believe you did once upon a time, but I guess they were phased out as TVs became more popular.
>The first supplementary licence fee for colour television was introduced in January 1968. Radio-only licences were abolished in February 1971 (along with the requirement for a separate licence for car radios).
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200405/cmselect/cmcu...
TV licensing on the other hand is "evil". They are in the business of collecting a tax that many people see as unfair, and prosecute those who don't pay. Even if their actions are fully justified, they won't make your life better, it is simply not their job. Even if they are genuinely nice in their communication, it won't change the fact that their are after your money and have to be forceful sometimes, and everything will be seen through these lens, so they might just as well assume their evilness.
We’ll see if they send mail or jackbooted inspectors across the pond to confirm.
Could it be that they print the letter (perhaps sign in person as it is a legal document) and then scan/OCR it prior to sending? The redacted thing would then be an identifier for the recipient to be automatically filed.
The email convo is from 2006 and this could be a realistic tech setup for this kind of organisation.
Oh to be a a fly on the wall when the inspector has to explain the difference to a blind person.
I think it made a lot more sense in the past. The license is set up so it’s a consumption based tax rather than taxing everyone. So only people with TVs paid TV tax. If colour increased the costs, only people consuming colour paid those increases. I imagine it made much more sense before consumption was ubiquitous
I hate having to pay for distribution licenses for soccer games, but if that ensures continued support for high-quality journalism, so be it.
I do realise that is not the case in the post, where it's probably even simpler to print the same message on every letter vs. only on some. And your point is of course well made in general.
"Don't turn this knob. But if you really need to, talk to this person first."
And that little bit of process is perhaps what keeps many industries safe.
Businesses are nice because they have to compete for customers, and that is easier if you're viewed as nice.
TV Licensing is a monopoly, they can have the worst customer service on earth, and that won't affect their revenue by much. There's just nowhere else to switch to.
This is also the reason why many government / publicly-run systems are so unfriendly and have such terrible UX. It's not like you can apply for benefits somewhere else (and the government would actually be very happy if you could!) , so nobody cares if the application is fifty pages and requires you to put in the same personal details 5 times.
To add insult to injury, there are no shareholders that demand the metrics to go up, so nobody has any incentive to optimize anything.
(Tamarians is a Star Trek reference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darmok)
One coworker got every white board in the area. Another got a sandwich and some empty coke cans. Another got a sofa and an empty trash bag.
The Machine Works.
If you were to design such a system in the 2020's, you could just put a DRM scheme on your broadcast and demand payment only from the people who actually want to watch that network specifically, but that technology wasn't yet available when such systems were designed.
Another claimed benefit of this way of doing things is the government's ability to produce programs that aren't commercially viable, e.g. targetting specific populations, minorities who speak a niche language, distributing important public information in a non-sensational way etc.
Most of these points are moot with the advent of the internet, though, hence why many countries want to or have abolished these licensing systems.
I'm no fan of national broadcasters as a concept, but I have to say, the UK is excellent when it comes to audio description, much more so than any (English speaking) country I'm aware of. It's not just the BBC either, Sky and other private broadcasters also have relatively high standards.
For years, the only English AD you could get for extremely popular HBO shows, like Game of Thrones for example, were pirated British rips from Sky, as HBO famously refused to provide the service.
1. Send out thousands of letters expecting some to be returned. They may be returned due to deliverability issues, or they may be returned with a reply attached or (probably less commonly) scrawled on the pages of the letter itself. Replies to letters are of course common whether they're expressly requested or not.
2. Give each letter a unique number in your database so you can cross reference the letter to the recipient information (including but not limited to the address) you have stored in your system. The letter may be returned with something else (e.g. another letter) attached so it's important to keep that information correlated.
3. Scanning the original letter is a low cost way to maintain this correlation. When the letters are returned you scan them then send them through a program you have set up to update the system accordingly. The program uses some primitive OCR and probably a checksum to automatically recognize the codes in the original letters. I can imagine this being used to automatically mark bad addresses if a letter is returned without additional context, but its main purpose is probably to route the letter - and any attachments, like other letters - to the appropriate agent.
To support a workflow not unlike the one described above, it is requested that the unique number that identifies the letter be left unobscured. This way OCR can do its job, deliverability issues can be flagged with minimal human involvement, and replies to letters can be put in front of the right person without creating too much organizational overhead.
There is no money being wasted. Although it might certainly be a case of paper being wasted.
We've been sent letters on an almost monthly basis claiming that an officer is "scheduled" to make a visit, that we have a "ten day window" to respond before they take action, etc... . Nothing ever happens and no one ever visits.
I know that you don't have to let the enforcement folk in, and if they turn up I'll politely ask to see their search warrant or for them to mind their own business. But lots of people don't know this and are conditioned to be passive. Prosecutions include the mentally vulnerable and people whose finances are handled by the council. There are thousands every year. Three quarters of the prosecutions are against women, and it makes up more than a quarter of prosecutions against women.
If you're blind, you almost certainly qualify for a free license.
Eh, the 2 countries I know charge people if they have a device capable of viewing the TV/radio/the TV/radio stations' online offer, so anyone with a smartphone (and who doesn't have a smartphone?) are also require to pay the license fee, even if they don't have a TV or radio at home.
There's a joke that since the license fee is charged if you have equipment theoretically capable of viewing TV, then maybe people should apply for government child allowance, since they have equipment theoretically able to make them parents.
I think the BBC could have solved this preemptively, by simply making the letter say "Please do not write below this line, if you are returning the letter."
I'd be pretty pissed if movers ignored instructions and tossed any of my stuff away of their own volition. I keep some non-functional belongings that may appear worthless to others, and my judgement should be what matters when moving or discarding my stuff.
It fits the states' identities, New York is (somewhat exaggerating) a kafkaesque dystopia that wants to be in all of your business and have absolute control over everything you do, while New Hampshire's state motto is "Live Free or Die".
My favorite is those company get-to-know-you questions written or oral that ask you to yourself in one word.
"Does not follow directions."
But it's unheard of (for media[1]) in the US and common in Europe.
[1]The closest thing we have here might be parking passes for state parks, even unpopular ones where free parking would remain mostly empty.
https://www.gov.uk/free-discount-tv-licence
https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check-if-you-need-one/for-your...
The van soon left after a few days but left a full bottle of yellow liquid. Makes a fun story, but yeah they threaten you a bunch and it's quite sad.
A company I worked for a long time ago paid to move me across the country. It hired both a moving company and a packing company. They both arrived on the morning of the big move and I told them to take everything, as I'd already packed everything I needed for the drive in my car.
Ten days later, the moving truck and unpacking company showed up at my new place, and among the items they unloaded was my kitchen trash can, complete with its trash from the previous city. Thank God I didn't have anything stinky in there!
This is unlikely - partly any news media is biased against government as they do the actual decisions, but mostly the BBC is middle class britain incarnate, whereas the tories represent - well whatever the right wing is becoming these days.
As for licence fee - it’s basically a historical accident that became a ring fenced tax. Governments have strong views about people not paying taxes.
[0] https://www.capita.com/news/capita-announces-five-year-exten...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_Un...
[1] https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check-if-you-need-one/topics/t...
So yes, of course there is absolutely money being wasted in this comparison.
life is exhausting sometimes
That's kinda assuming that everybody would continue to pay the license fee if the enforcement was stopped.
I have no clue how much revenue the TV licenses generate, or whether 100 million for administration and enforcement is a reasonable number. It feels unlikely to me?
Google google google:
In 2021, there were 24.8 million households in England
The TV licence fee is currently £159 a year
Unexpectly a book I always wanted to read, which was written by a VP, he said he was coming by, so I had him autograph it. His note "please take it easy on them." Sold for more than $200.
The Machine Works, and mostly not the way it was intended. Sorry.
I guess I could start calling such a situation "HPsquared and schlauerfox on Chesterton" : - )
So long and thanks for all the mislabeled SSDs. Just wiped them single pass, and used them in systems all over.
It's your judgment and that should always be respected, but everything else... Catch-22.
It's real in the sense a thing called a TV Licence exists but the TV Licence enforcers are just an arm from the BBC who larp as a government organisation to threaten people.
So in a sense it's real but it's also not.
Of course, to be considered legally blind, your vision has to be that bad with the best correction available. (Below 20/200)
The movers binned the lot.
I realised this only after they'd left.
I was quite displeased.
This lesson brought to you by a mashup of Chesterton's Fence and The Sorcerer's Apprentice.
There are people going door-to-door to check TV licenses? Are they cops, what kind of power do they have? Seems extremely annoying and dystopian.
That jacket was specifically adjusted and positioned exactly there because it blocks just enough of thr EM interference from the old ass microwave in the small kitchen three floors down!
If the jacket isn’t there and Marge in accounts receivable starts making her breakfast burrito early one morning while they’re running payroll the main query times out and doesn’t automatically retry, so the header of the CSV file can’t pull in the right fields for each location, the export writes out blank headers, the bank can’t read the file, and THE ENTIRE COMPANY doesn’t get paid!
For the love of god, PUT THE JACKET BACK!
My jurisdiction finally got rid of annual/biannual car registration fees and stickers. Was a rather pointless process other than collecting money.
Was hoping they'd raise gas taxes by 0.1cents/litre or something, but I guess they buried it in with other taxes.
Unfortunately, we still require driver's license renewals every 5 years for CAD$90. And they don't bother taking a picture with every renewal because that was too much bureaucracy for them. I think it's only once I'm 80 they'll haul me in for a cognitive test.
Meanwhile the Canadian CBC is buried in taxes and has as many ads as any other station.
Not really sure what the point of them is, other than documenting some of the weird stuff people doing customer service find themselves responding to.
> Having kept all my TVL/BBC envelopes ...
Well, that's a thing.
It sounds so farcical now, in our age of ubiquitous surveillance capitalism.
I wrote seven pages with diagrams, charts, and explanation of the weights and air resistances of various metal alloys that most planes are made of. There were foot notes and an additional two pages of citations.
And on the tenth page was just one line, "I made all of that up. I hope you enjoyed reading this."
I got so much hate mail from the physics department. It was amazing.
It would be easy to say they don't make anything like Kenneth Clarke programs anymore but even late Blair era documentaries seem to be fading away. Nature stuff is still good though but that's just cinematography.
This will probably kill it.
We build the best Rube Goldberg machines - they take out payroll when the mouse trap falls.
The later reply about it being because OCR does use what's below the line and it shouldn't be obscured looks like the ticket was escalated to someone who understood what was really being asked for.
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/806/