WASA

Troubleshooting the Error: A Real World Example.

~ Taran ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday, tapping away at my keyboard on my laptop, my screen flickered black. I sighed. “Maybe it was a one off with some background process”, I thought, going about my business. It was 3:22 pm.

It flickered again. I started paying attention. It did it again.

Now I paid attention to the screen because when I write, I generally don’t look at the screen. I’ve been typing that long where I can look outside at the trees blowing in the wind and only glance at the screen as I need to. As I just did with that sentence.

Now, looking at the screen, I noticed that the text was lagging in LibreOffice Writer and that Microsoft 10’s ‘circle of death’ was spinning right before the screen flickered again.

“Great”, I thought, “I get to be distracted by Microsoft Windows Shenanigans again.”

I brought up the task manager (I call it the task mangler) and waited. There went the flicker again after the circle of death. The task manager also flickered and that would indicate that the problem was likely a video driver.

I had officially changed from writer to troubleshooter at this point, having completely lost my original train of thought. I’d allowed Microsoft to do it’s annoying update fairly recently, so I went through the process of reading up on the changes in their Knowledge Base, written by a group of people who have no business writing any sort of documentation. That seemed clear.

And so then I checked to make sure the drivers were up to date, which required a password I’d forgotten because I use the PIN. So suddenly I’m trying to solve that problem while Windows is trying to tell me to update something else. I updated again, per their suggestion.

The flicker remained. It even seemed to worsen. It could have been my patience steaming out of my ears in having to deal with this, and I thought very dark thoughts about people in Redmond, Washington. Very dark thoughts indeed, thoughts that I will not write here because someone might take it seriously enough to send a team to come have a chat with me. I kid, I kid! Maybe!

I’d been doing the web browsing for some of the troubleshooting on my phone because that screen didn’t flicker, and I was about to go back to writing on a separate machine – the Apple I have stashed in another room, whose keys don’t travel the way I like. I visited the bathroom and switched on the light when I saw that there was a phase issue. The light flickered.

Suddenly it all fell into place. I checked my phone’s WhatsApp at 4:39 pm to see that there had been another phase issue on the compound for an hour.

My laptop was acting out because it thought that electricity was disconnecting and reconnecting through the surge protectors. I had recalled noticing the battery charging showing up in the lower right from time to time but since I was hyperfocused on a particular branch of troubleshooting, I had completely missed the basics.

I had forgotten where I lived – Trinidad and Tobago – and I had forgotten the compound had been suffering phase issues since they closed down the main power station in the area, PowerGen, some time ago. Since around that time, we’ve had phase issues at Victoria Keyes, which I wrote to Trinidad and Tobago Electricity Commission (T&TEC) about to not avail.

The WhatsApp chat was useless, filled with things that I had responded to and answered over the course of the last 3 years about what happens on the compound when we have phase issues. It’s one of the reasons I ignore the chat; I hate repeating myself and I often feel the need to explain things to people who explanations bounce off of, despite my best efforts in trying different ways to communicate it. Electricity, as common as it is, confounds people.

I took a break, T&TEC sent a truck, they reset a fuse on a local transformer and I thought to myself that they really need to deal with this consistent problem again. One of the people applauded the T&TEC response time, which was stellar, but… we keep having the same issue over and over again.

So – I was troubleshooting the wrong thing to start with, and because I find the signal to noise ratio of the chats at Victoria Keyes inordinately low, I ignored them. I spent an hour chasing the wrong problem and, had I simply remembered where I lived. In a country where even water is an issue because everyone likes to kick the can down the road, which impacted my community up until a few days ago.

Microsoft’s off the hook. Poor governance and government run enterprises, through a shell game of government owned corporations, struck again.

When troubleshooting, the first step is to check your instruments. In Trinidad and Tobago, it also means checking the quality of your electrical connection. Fortunately, computers don’t require water, so we don’t have to have that in the troubleshooting guide.

There. I feel better now.

Digitized Paper Processes of Trinidad and Tobago

~ Taran ~ 1 Comment

Computerize THIS.It drives me a bit nuts when I have to deal with some things in Trinidad and Tobago. When I signed up for electronic billing for Water (WASA) and for Electricity (T&TEC), not to mention Internet (Amplia), I foolishly expected a process that was not reliant on paper.

How foolish of me. I have to print these bills and take them somewhere to pay them, which isn’t really an electronic transaction at all – it just saves these companies money so that they don’t have to bill me for sending me a paper bill, and also, it allows me independence from the local post (TTPost) from sending me my bills late.

Bureaucracy / Bürokratie IITo add insult to injury, the bills don’t just print on one page – they require… 2 pages. Why? Because it’s the same bill that they used to mail to me… and experimentation has shown that, no, I can’t just go with one page. I require both pages to pay the bill.

I’m sure that there are educated people hiding behind this somewhere, but it does their education a disservice to come up with systems that are hardly intelligent. It’s reminiscent of the United States in the 1990s, when some people would not let their fax machines out of their clenched fists.

PaperworkThis goes beyond bill payment – which, of course, is cursed by lack of online payment options for the masses, causing people to lose hours of productivity so that they can stand in a line to create a paper trail. Nevermind the photocopies of identification that still go on.

On a trip to the bank today to deal with paying some maintenance fees, I half-joked to the teller that trips to the bank were like visiting another country. Stamp! Stamp!

Papers, please. Reason for transaction? What’s your dog’s mother’s maiden name? How long was your stay?

Last week, a woman stood before me, not long ago, modem in hand – trying to return it to bMobile – her 5th attempt, which she had documented well with her phone and envelopes full of paper. Why so much trouble? Did you need to ask?

It should be as simple as returning the modem, which they then check the serial number of – it then becomes clear that you’re no longer using it, or should, and be pretty much the disconnection of your account unless you have another modem you purchased yourself and they are already aware of it. But this is not the process.

All of these are symptomatic of people simply adding technology to a paper process – par for the course of a bureaucracy educated beyond it’s intelligence level.

One day, it may aspire to achieve to mediocrity. We’re waiting.

A Flood of Failures: Beyond ODPM.

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Trinidad flood
Image Courtesy Flickr User ‘Trinidad News’ using a Creative Commons License .

This isn’t a technology post; however, it’s a post about failed systems and tangible problems here in Trinidad and Tobago.

There’s much that has been said about the ODPM, and having seen the press conference they suffered Trinidad and Tobago and the rest of the world with, I’ve decided not to throw them under the bus only because they are already under the bus. It’s not even a challenge, but I offer they are under the wrong bus and those that should be with them are not under it.

Instead, I will write perhaps what they should have said as well as what should be corrected.

We have a tendency to believe that the ODPM, like any government agency, is on it’s own. When I look to criticize constructively, as someone with a technical background it is expected of me to point out the incompatible systems, the bottlenecks, and the problems with the apps and websites. Those are painfully obvious, and I have written about them before in the context of Brett.

Instead, let’s look at the systems.

We have a few agencies that are really involved with the flooding who are not garnering the attention they should be after these incidents – the ODPM, in this way, is a red herring offered for the masses to feed on.

The real problem is deeper, and the ODPM’s failures – as real as they are – only skim the surface of the actual problem: Flooding during wet season, water retention during dry season.

Environmental Management Authority

Let’s talk about the Environmental Management Authority (EMA) a moment. Their corporate vision, from their website, is to be “Stewards of Trinidad and Tobago’s natural resources and environment meeting current and future human, ecological and economic needs.”

I’d say that avoiding flooding is a part of current and future human, ecological and economic needs.

Their mission, as they communicate it on their website, is: “We are committed to sustainably manage the natural resources and environment by providing a transparent framework to facilitate policy and decision making in development. This will be undertaken within an approved regulatory system, utilising intensive public education and a collaborative cross-sectoral approach.”

So, how is it that a large amount of rainfall has created a problem that the ODPM cannot handle on more than one occasion? How is the EMA involved in that? Is it involved in that? Should it be involved in that?

It sounds like it is a big part of their job to this layperson.

Ministry of Planning And Development, Town And Country Division
This department is one I mainly know for authorizing land development and even changing land zoning. Clearly they should be working with the EMA; what they actually do is hard to find since they have an almost random note on the Ministry of Planning and Development’s website. They clearly should be more transparent. Website, anyone?

That they are almost always ignored in land development is something that may have something to do with that, as well as what seems to be an arduous process to get anything done – so much so that illegal land development has been an underlying problem with some of the flooding.

This is such a case that the Minister of Works has said he’ll be going after illegal land developers.

And yet, legal land development is hardly something that information can be found for, and what can be found is typically through people who know how the system works and how it doesn’t. In some regards, this could be  considered corruption, in others, it could be an inefficient bureaucracy that frustrates people to the point that they just go do their own thing.

Why is the Ministry of Planning and Development, Town and Country Division, more effective in reducing the potential for flooding? You’d think that they and the EMA would be joined at the hip.

Water and Sewage Authority (WASA)

We’re told that WASA is responsible for all the water in Trinidad and Tobago. Though I have never see it in writing, all water on the ground in the country allegedly is WASA’s water – unless, of course, there is flooding, where not even WASA wants it.

I bring them up because what we see as flooding in wet season is potential water to retain during dry season. In a country where many people still wait for pipe-borne water to fill their tanks on a daily basis, where water is almost always a problem during dry season, one has to wonder how WASA’s water retention isn’t being looked at as well.

Ministry of Works and Transport Drainage Division

As I regularly pass across Mosquito Creek, as many others do, we all see the problems with drainage. Flooding along any roads?

Sure.

The Flood of Failure.

So yes, the ODPM didn’t handle the cascade of failures that creates flooding again. Sure, the Regional Corporations are also culpable at least to an extent – but with all this bureaucracy to save us from flooding, do we really want to blame the ODPM, forced to drink all this water, for wetting the bed? Clearly, the ODPM needs some work, but how much should we expect from them when much of this could be prevented?

Technology vs. Bureaucracy: a T&TEC Connection

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ElectricityOne of the less fun things I get to do in dealing with land ownership is assisting people in getting electrical connections from the Trinidad and Tobago Electricity Commission (T&TEC).  The legitimate way of doing this is the land owner giving permission for the connection to the person getting the connection.

The why of people getting connections on land they do not (yet) own is fodder for another post on Land Laws in Trinidad and Tobago – but take it on faith that it’s done.

In 2008 I did this for someone. 9 years later, I’m doing it for someone else.

First, I’ll tell you how it happens. Then I’ll tell you everything that is wrong with it.

How it ‘Works’

The person getting the connection has to present evidence of land ownership or permission from the land owner. To do this, T&TEC wants to see a deed, and they want a letter from the landowner if the person does not own the land – as well as identification, which they diligently photocopy and probably place in a file somewhere marked, “Kill Trees”. Simple enough, you might think.

To make things easier, a landowner can send a photocopy of their ID and deed along with the person getting the connection.

That gets them ready to get an inspection done. The actual connection requires… all of the above again.

Since I’m not one to send someone running around with photocopies of my ID and deed, all of this means I get the joy of going to T&TEC in San Fernando, where they refer you to an orange desk which is now closer to a pink salmon (I asked a woman with matching nail polish what color her nails were). We sat there for an hour or so, watching frustrated T&TEC employees chained to keyboards of a system that was ‘giving trouble’, got to the desk and – fortunately – I had prepared everything for them so that in 15 minutes of photocopying and signatures, I could move on with my life. I don’t know how long the person getting connected stayed after.

How it Should Work.

A lot of people don’t know that T&TEC, circa 2010, mapped T&TEC poles all over Trinidad and Tobago and has them on a map. They can, with accuracy, tell you where they have their poles. And these are on a map of Trinidad and Tobago that had, or should still have, an up to date list of all the surveys registered in Trinidad and Tobago.

I say this because anyone with a deed can walk in and get someone else connected on someone else’s land. That’s clearly fraud, but it can happen by mistake when a land owner doesn’t know where their boundaries are. Therefore, the requirement of the deed is actually worthless without a survey that shows where the connection will be.

As I recall from years ago, I had to do this for a Water and Sewage Authority (WASA) connection around 2010. In my opinion, this is more in line with Land Law in Trinidad and Tobago, but I am no attorney and do not play one on the Internet.

The registered survey than be searched for if it were linked with the Ministry of Planning And Development, Town and Country Division systems. Then that would, if connected, be able to search the registry of Deeds at the Red House (which does not yet seem computerized).

If this were done, it would be apparent who legally owns the land, whose permission would be needed, etc. It would, of course, require the various databases to be kept up to date and interconnected.

And identification? Does no one see a flaw in accepting photocopies of identification not done on site? I could easily scan something in and alter it, printing it out. No, instead why not just have the T&TEC employee verify the identification is legitimate and enter the relevant information? Why are we killing trees in 2017 over this nonsense?

So, why hasn’t all of this been done? Why should this be hard to do? Why not remove the potential for error and corruption by appropriate use of technology?

There’s a question that should haunt every government administration since Independence. It’s a symptom of the larger problems, the elephants in the room that have ground the fine china into powder. Ministries not working together, a lack of a holistic vision, and a flood of ‘we like it so’.

I now return you to your regularly programmed bureaucracy.