Hierarchies and the Power Imbalance

Posted on February 9, 2020 by Athene Donald

It is perhaps helpful, if depressing, that stories of harassment and bullying in many spheres now reach headline status.  Helpful because it means these issues get an airing instead of simply lurking in the long grass. Just this week there have been the resurrection of accusations of bullying against the former speaker John Bercow, and the resignation of a high profile MSP for inappropriate (for want of a better word, since it doesn’t appear actually to be criminal) texting of a youth 26 years his junior. Power imbalance sits at the heart of both these examples from the political sphere, and power imbalance is so often manifest in the toxic situations that arise in universities. Hierarchies abound throughout our institutions.

The most obvious case is the supervisor: research student relationship. Here a student may well feel the power all resides with the supervisor, and ‘inappropriate behaviour’ has to be swallowed. Inappropriate here may mean sexual harassment and worse, but even more common is bullying, denigration and humiliation.  Postdocs and technicians may equally feel they suffer from regular tongue-lashings or explicit put-downs. Those at the receiving end of such behaviour, particularly if over an extended period of time, are likely to end up doubting their worth, their research abilities or their futures in an academic sphere. They may walk out because a PhD, or a paper with their name on it, is simply not worth the pain of achievement.

Each of us has a different degree of tolerance for such behaviour, but no one should need to find out what that tolerance level is. Why do supervisors feel they need to use the power imbalance to make someone else feel small? I guess there are three categories of people who are likely to exhibit such unpleasant and unacceptable behaviour: those who lack all empathy and cannot put themselves in the other person’s shoes; those whose upbringing has given them such a sense of superiority they believe they are entitled to treat those they deem to be lesser mortals like dirt; and those whose own sense of self-worth is so shaky they can only believe in themselves if they believe those around them are insignificant. Maybe you can think of other ‘types’. But all of them should be made to recognize that this behaviour will not be put up with.

Unfortunately, of course, all too often it is put up with, because the victim(s) sees no way out. In some ways this sort of bullying should be easier to put a stop to than sexual harassment. That sort of behaviour typically occurs, literally, behind closed doors or in other private spaces. Bullying – shouting and humiliation – frequently occurs in front of other students or staff. This is why it ought to be possible for others to act. It is all too clear that a victim making a complaint is likely to find their path painful and anecdotally frequently it leads them nowhere, except possibly the exit. How many victims feel they have to put up and shut up because they have no confidence the system will work for them, however egregious they feel the behaviour they are enduring may be? Universities may try, but story after story suggests that too often the ‘centre’ would rather the student just quietly went away without a fuss in preference to a star performer being sanctioned, let alone sacked.

So, if due process is slow, painful and likely to lead nowhere, intervention by others may be more likely to lead to better outcomes. With bystander training spreading for dealing with harassment cases, can we not do something similar with bullying? Watching a supervisor humiliate a nervous student attempting to give a presentation, could the rest of the group step in? The answer to that must be yes, but it is never going to be easy. Anyone who speaks up will feel they may be the next victim, even if in some senses there ought to be safety in numbers. Bullies typically have favourites, so they may be the best people to intervene, but of course equally have the most to lose and may anyhow be favoured because they share similar characteristics to the supervisor.

I heard someone recently state that they thought universities did better in this space than industry and business. I can’t say I agree. In a company there are likely to be more formal reporting chains, more people involved, reducing the dependency – in terms of letters of reference, opportunities and funding for instance – compared with a PhD supervisor. Collectively we need to find solutions that don’t simply involve formal complaints and grievance procedures. Interventions sooner and in lower-key ways ought to be viable in a supportive environment, with supervisors knowing that their behaviour is being watched for inappropriate language and actions.

Hierarchies are not going to go away, nor are power imbalances, but what one does with that power should be a matter for reflection. Paul Nurse – a man of immense power in his capacity as former President of Rockefeller Institute, past President of the Royal Society and now founding Director of the Crick Institute, not to mention a  Nobel Prize winner, puts it well:

We need a supportive environment so it’s important to be nice to each other. Also it is very important in science to disagree, to argue, but you don’t do it in a way where you attack the individual: you attack their ideas.

Would that more of those who wield power recognized the power that niceness itself confers, in enabling people to be the best that they can, not simply a cog in someone else’s wheel. That attacks (and this could also include virtual attacks over social media, although that is not the primary location to which I’m referring) should not be ad hominem but based on facts and evidence. One must be an idealist, and, if this problem is given more visibility, collectively academia ought to be able to mitigate the potential damage inflicted on individuals before their careers are irreparably ruined.

 

Posted in Science Culture | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

It’s Not My Brexit Either

Posted on February 2, 2020 by Athene Donald

I am trying to decide whether to remove the Twitter ‘Scientists for the EU’ twibbon from my profile. I still am a scientist and I’m still pro EU, but there’s no longer quite the same message to be conveyed. Fellow OT blogger Stephen Curry has written eloquently how January 31st was not about his Brexit, so I won’t repeat his arguments, with which I wholeheartedly agree. I do, however, have to decide about this twibbon (inertia, as well as sentiment, probably means it will stay a while).

On the other hand, I have made a decision about what to do about my Bollocks to Brexit badge, purchased on the first of the two massive London demonstrations I went on. Whether they want it or not, I’m going to add it to my ‘papers’. That means the College Archives can file it in due course for any researchers to happen upon it if they are wanting to study what life was like for a female scientist in the years around the turn of the 21st century. (I do find it pretty improbable that my patchy archives would be of interest, but that’s beside the point.) I did decide, on January 31st, not actually to wear mourning black, appropriate though it would have been on other fronts when I addressed a student group in another Cambridge college about violence and harassment against women.

However, we are where we are, and my job must surely be to make the best of what currently feels like a very bad lot. As head of a Cambridge college which employs many EU nationals and welcomes many EU students, I must be sure we help and support the former, if and when they want to apply for settled status, and reassure the latter as required. I must make sure that racism – or any other kind of -ism – does not raise its ugly head within our walls just because we are now outside the EU and someone might want to see some people as ‘other’ and therefore fair game for insults and worse. I hope no one in the College thinks like this, but vigilance will be needed.

As a scientist I need to focus on anything I could do to do to ensure that UK science is not set massively back by our departure. The news on Tier 1 visas is welcome, but slightly cosmetic; that is not where the biggest problems for UK science lies. We need to worry, not just about ‘exceptional talent’, but all those who contribute to what has been (and I hope will continue to be) a world-leading community: the postdocs and technicians in particular, who haven’t (yet) reached the heady heights of ‘exceptional talent’ but who are nevertheless essential to the more senior folk who will get fast-tracked into the country. We know these key but more junior people are not likely to be particularly well paid, so any salary thresholds introduced into visas at other levels will need to be carefully watched. Our whole enterprise may founder if we lose too many of these vital and smart individuals.

I have frequently written about my admiration for the ERC (e.g. here), having watched it at close quarters as a former Scientific Council member, and this is another area which is likely to be hugely important for the scientific community (and here I mean not just scientists in the standard, narrow English meaning of the word, but the much broader sense to include social scientists and researchers in the humanities too). Can we associate with the new HorizonEurope programme or can we not?

It’s such a fundamental question to which, of course, as yet there is no glimmer of an answer. And even if an Association Agreement is fixed within the next 11 months – an extremely tall order; it took Switzerland about two years to be readmitted into the EU fold after their own referendum on Croatian workers excluded them – what will it mean? The UK has been extraordinarily successful, winning more from the ERC than its contribution amounts to and usually winning more grants than any other country. Continuing to take out more than it puts in seems almost inevitably to be an unacceptable outcome for the EU to grant.

We should recognize that investment in science potentially benefits everyone – through reinvigorating the economy, through solving our major societal challenges and through enabling better decision-making by our policy-makers. We must not allow anyone to think scientists wishing to see protection of funding are merely self-interested. Too often I fear the scientific community comes across this way.

The ERC’s focus on excellence as the sole criterion when judging proposals has made it stand out, but it does not mean that the work funded does not have major impact and societal benefits. The 11 years of the ERC have been extraordinarily successful. A review of the research it has funded demonstrated just how much the work has been seminal and innovative in ideas and impact. If formal association cannot be achieved, how can we replicate its strengths within our domestic sphere? The Smith and Reid Review provides a set of plausible alternatives to consider, but the devil will be the detail of any new funding as much as in the money. With the government’s pledge of a significant uplift in funding for science, the money may even (for once) not be the primary challenge. On the other hand it could turn out that the ARPA-like entity now so much in the news (see the recent collection of essays published by Policy Exchange) swallows up much of the public money uplift for its own more targetted purposes.

But, money aside, there are other problems that the UK will face without access to HorizonEurope and specifically the ERC. According to the Royal Society’s 2018 factsheet, around 17% of researchers in the UK came from the EU, compared with 12% from the entire rest of the world. In Cambridge, about 15% of the academic staff are EU nationals. If visas for visiting researchers are forthcoming without months of waiting or high cost (and not, as I said before, just for the most senior), maybe these people will still want to come. But the costs for healthcare, for dependents and so on may make us pretty unattractive as a destination by comparison with simply moving within the EU. My main concern in the absence of an Association Agreement, however, is that the ‘brightest and best’ the Government is prone to refer to will wish to remain in a country where they can still access HorizonEurope funding. The ERC’s prestige and success mean that to opt to remain in – let alone relocate to – a country from which applications cannot be made, when as an EU national living within mainland Europe the option will stay on the table, may seem a quixotic choice.

I know anecdotally how much these concerns have been and are being expressed by EU academics already well-established here. Some of them have already left; many more are sitting tight waiting to see what happens. Well, we’ll all know soon what the answer is. I fear that the EU brain drain will rapidly increase from a steady flow to a flood if we are excluded from Horizon2020. Putting more money into the system by whatever mechanism is unlikely to stem that flood, however welcome many of us will find it. Our research and our communities will be the poorer for not being part of the wider scientific endeavour. Our children and our grandchildren will look back in astonishment.

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No More Red Meat?

Posted on January 17, 2020 by Athene Donald

The terrifying and deadly fires in Australia are a grim reminder of climate change. Greta Thunberg should be a prick (indeed more than a prick) to everyone’s conscience, reminding us that each and every one of us has a part to play in reducing global emissions through our individual carbon footprints. Thinking hard about what our personal contribution can be should be a backdrop to our lives. Questions such as ‘is that flight really necessary?’ That is a question that has rapidly risen up the academic’s list of awkward questions as travel to conferences is contemplated, as well as (perhaps) a personal desire to see the world or sun oneself on a balmy Mediterranean beach. If the flight is deemed ‘essential’, then can one offset to mitigate the damage? Is that sufficient?

As head of an institution, considerations regarding sustainability in our operations need to be centre stage. Where can our organisation’s carbon footprint be trimmed? How can our estate move towards carbon neutrality? There are easy wins, and wicked problems. Churchill is a relatively young college among its Cambridge peers, but it still faces many of the same challenges concerning its buildings, which will be hard to bring up to modern standards. Large windows are lovely to look out of, but so far the local council’s planning laws have made it impossible to double glaze them. The heat loss is consequently very great. And so it goes on. We will continue to consider how to reduce our emissions of all types, and as part of the drive I will write on this blog from time to time about our problems and attempted solution.

So, in this first post on the subject, a look at our catering activities. Spearheaded by the Domestic Bursar, Shelley Surtees, and the Head of Catering, David Oakley, there has been a complete reorganisation of the hot plate servery for lunch and dinner over the past year or so.  The eating arrangements are of course of great importance to our students, and making sure that what is on offer is both acceptable and affordable is a key requirement for success all round. The University as a whole has already described how it has changed its catering operation to remove red meat (meat from sheep and cows, the ruminant species) and has indicated the success of these moves. Churchill has been doing the same for some time, nudging our customers – students, postdocs and fellows not just from the College but those from across the West Cambridge site who use our cafeteria – to make more sustainable choices.

You don’t have to understand (or care) why ruminant species in our foodchain are so bad for the environment to opt for a vegan or vegetarian choice; if a vegan platter is the first option you come to in the food queue, and you see other people in front of you selecting this choice, perhaps curry or risotto, you may well follow suit. With the layout we now have, the first choices are vegan, followed by vegetarian, then fish (sustainably sourced of course) and finally a meat choice – but not red meat. At popular times of day our queues are long, and if you want to hold out for the meat you’re going to have to tame your hunger significantly longer. Many folk, we’ve discovered, just go for the first or second choice they come to. And that will be plant-based.

However, to find out more about our (un)sustainable habits, I’ve been reading Mike Berners-Lee’s 2010 book How Bad are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything I’m sure there are more recent books on the subject^ with more up-to-date figures for everything from the footprint of laundry to sending an email, but it is a good start for putting things in perspective. Cows and lamb are bad for many reasons, including that they fart methane, a greenhouse gas 25 times worse per kilogram than carbon dioxide. What I found depressing as I read the book, which I should have known but hadn’t appreciated, is that this means milk and cheese are bad news too. A dairy cow may fart less than a beef cow, I’m not sure about that, and the details will depend on a huge number of variables such as what they’ve eaten, but a cow is a cow is bad. So some of my favourite (vegetarian) choices of macaroni cheese or baked potatoes with cheese and beans are not really that good. But certainly better than a cut off the joint or a steak, given that the weight of milk/cheese will be significantly less.

Luckily, I’m no fan of lumps of red meat (though I’m not technically a vegetarian, and am allergic to some fish and seafood and so steer well clear of these choices), but the College is simply not providing these routinely in the servery. To quantify what this means in our kitchens, no lamb was purchased last year or the year before for our standard meals; and beef was reduced to less than 10% of its 2018 figure in 2019. Pork, chicken and turkey were however still on the menu. The first and last were purchased at more or less the same levels in the last two years; chicken purchases dropped by around 25% last year.

Sales, however, at the tills have increased over this period. We are a popular college to eat in! So, without working out (inevitably inaccurately, as all these figures must be) what our carbon emissions’ reduction has been due to these changes, we can see that they will be very substantial. Plant-based foods are now dominant, although perhaps we need to think more carefully about dairy products. Customers have not been turned away by the change in practice. Indeed, one might wonder how conscious some of them may have been of the changes. As our domestic bursar has said, if the first food you come to looks and smells good, and you can see people in front of you in the queue have been helping themselves to it, why would you not do the same?

Next up, in the College Buttery (a place that is somewhere between a bar and a café, with snacks) we are introducing bulk dispensers of various goodies, both the healthy (e.g. banana chips or trail mix) and the less healthy (various kinds of sweets), so that people can purchase snacks without aluminium foil or other excess wrappings. The challenge of paper versus plastic needs further thought. We have banned single use plastic bottles from regular College supplies, and the Buttery will now also keep bulk stocks of liquids for laundry and washing-up so that students can come to fill up their own containers, not throw them away each time they finish one. These latest steps are brand new, so their success needs to be monitored over time.

The government has been keen on nudging as a means to change habits, and the alteration in the servery seems to be working for us. It is one small step forward in making our operations more sustainable, but it has been visibly successful right from the outset. There will be more to come.

^ This ETH Zurich startup/initiative website has been brought to my attention as looking at food carbon footprints, though it isn’t clear how relevant it may be for the UK

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Thinking about Your Workload

Posted on January 10, 2020 by Athene Donald

The first time I was asked to serve on a research council (standing) committee, when a young(ish) researcher, I did not seek my head of department’s position. I informed him, since it happened we worked closely together, but it did not occur to me to ask permission, to check whether he thought it was compatible with my departmental job. I just assumed it was part of the job. The only quibble I had with his response was that he insisted I attend the first meeting when, as I was still feeding my seven-month old baby, I had not intended to go to avoid the logistic complexities of attending a meeting in Swindon. My maternity leave was only 16 weeks back then, and that was generous.

When, many years later, I was asked to chair such a committee – again a standing panel, not an ad hoc one – I likewise did not think to ask for anyone’s agreement. I thought it was part of an academic’s role and I just had to fit it in somehow. Indeed, every significant role I’ve taken on – ranging from being the university’s Gender Equality Champion to chairing the Royal Society’s Education Committee, roles which probably foolishly I took on more or less simultaneously and then added in serving on the ERC’s Science Committee, I just made my own decision and got on with it. As far as I understood the ‘rules’, as long as I delivered research suitable for the RAE/REF and did the teaching and examining that was asked of me, anything else was up to me. All the roles I’m talking about were, fairly obviously, academically relevant and (I believe) beneficial to the wider community.

In Cambridge that seems to have been accepted in the spirit intended. Certainly no head of department ever hauled me over the coals, rather the contrary. We have (and have had for quite a long time) a workload model in the Cavendish Laboratory which takes external activities such as these into account, albeit hours for some types of activities are ‘capped’. For many years – because I also served on University Council and many of its dependent committees and at other times was a deputy head of department – my workload always came out towards the high end of the departmental distribution, even if there were many departmental tasks I did not do. I never, for instance, served on the teaching committee, and my actual teaching load was below average. But it all came out in the wash, as it were.

However, the more I talk to colleagues in other universities, the more I know how lucky I was and how enlightened our workload model has been. I hear depressing stories of people who devote a lot of time to issues connected with inclusion, or with professional bodies, who get zero, or close to zero allowance from their departments. Indeed, in one case they were told that, since they spent far more time on one of these activities than the workload in their university would ‘allow’ or take into account, they would have to take the time out of their vacation allowance. I was truly shocked.

There are instances, I hear, where it would seem jealousy that someone has made a name for themselves through outreach and engagement, with the public or with policy-makers, comes into play. Then they (and the plural here is not to disguise their gender, but because there is more than one case like this I’ve come across) face constant sniping from colleagues who then try to load them with humdrum chores regardless of the benefit (indeed including REF impact cases) they might be bringing to their department. Pathetically, in those cases where these stories surface, it is clear how much those impact cases will really matter. And just how much financial benefit does that bring? It seems incredibly short-sighted to say to such a person: you really do have to teach this first year course that the students hate and anyone else in the department could do, with the subtext that the department is going to cut you down to size.

Alice Roberts, without relating the jealousy to workloads, spelled this sort of attitude out

During my academic career I’ve encountered quite considerable opposition and obstacles to engaging with the public. Firstly, it is difficult to squeeze something else into an already busy job. But then there’s also – still, I think – a feeling amongst a few academics that communicating about your own research and your field more generally is a distraction, an irrelevance, a frivolity.

And what was the outcome of such negative views? Alice moved to another university where she is doing very nicely, thank you, as Professor of Public Engagement in Science. Departments should not be surprised if someone like her, who has risen to public prominence because of the excellence of their work outside the straight and narrow of the department but is treated as if they are bringing nothing special to the department, either digs their heels in or turns their back.

These issues are not unrelated to a recent study which highlighted the psychologically unsafe academic environment that so many academics, young and old, find themselves in: unsafe because of the stresses, the toxic workplace culture, the hostile bosses, the outright bullying and harassment and the overloading. If you have a workload model that can tolerate an individual working 140% of a normal (however defined) week, or that chooses to ignore a large part of that person’s legitimate academic activities because they are outside the department, then there is a problem. There is a problem for the individual, the department and the entire community. Is it any surprise that mental health issues are now such a major part of academia?

I would want to stress any workload model – and a department really needs one if it is to apply for an Athena Swan award convincingly – has to take into account the full spread of tasks and roles that benefit the department and the wider community. Maybe REF environment statements should require this to be more fully spelled out; the old-fashioned ‘esteem’ of the RAE had its own problems but did allow for explicit recognition of some of these activities. It strikes me as totally unacceptable that an individual rising to prominence externally to the profit (possibly literally) of an institution, should not be credited appropriately for that work. If no one could accept chairing a major committee – research council or anything else – because they would still be expected to contribute just as much to the department as someone not shouldering this responsibility, then where would our academic world end up? If no one served on Whitehall committees or were prepared to front TV programmes, would our universities be in a better place? I doubt it.

Perhaps I should have personally been less cavalier about what roles I took on without discussion – I know for sure in one case the person fingered as my successor to chair one of the relevant committees would not agree till they had ‘sign off’ from their head; perhaps that was wise and appropriate – but institutions need to recognize they are part of an ecosystem. If individuals are not permitted to take on diverse tasks externally, or only ‘permitted’ as long as no departmental allowance in their internal workload occurs, the whole system will ultimately grind to a halt. To, need I say it, everyone’s detriment.

 

Posted in Communicating Science, Science Culture | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Shenanigans with the Railways

Posted on January 7, 2020 by Athene Donald

Rules about railway tickets have clearly always been mysterious, as this Punch cartoon of 1869 makes clear.

Punch 1869b

 “‘Station Master say, Mum, as cats is ‘dogs,’ and rabbits is ‘dogs,’ and so’s parrots; but this ere ‘tortis’ is an insect, so there ain’t no charge for it!”

In that case a station master (do such people even exist now?) made up some guidelines for the cost of taking a tortoise on a train. In my case most of the (lengthy) exchanges took place by email, but the ‘rules’ applied made about as much sense.

In early November I took a train to London to present a talk on diversity issues at Kings College. Or so I thought. All was going well for the first twenty minutes or so, when the packed train came to a stop somewhere the Cambridge side of Letchworth. We waited and waited. In due course we were told there was a power outage somewhere ahead and in due course the train was reversed all the way to Baldock. By this point I was already so late I knew I wasn’t going to make my conference ‘slot’ and, rather than hope that the train company (Great Northern) would work out some way of getting me to London eventually, I chose to take a train back to Cambridge: for reasons that weren’t clear to me trains were still coming through in that direction. I got back to Cambridge Station about three hours after I left. What a waste of energy. Ultimately, I gave my talk, by Skype, at some completely rearranged time during the afternoon. The organisers were incredibly understanding (these communications mainly by Twitter DM) although, despite the desirability in general of more talks being given by Skype to reduce everyone’s carbon footprint, I didn’t enjoy the experience. Perhaps, with more time for preparation and checking of the technology I’d have felt better.

So far so bad. As usual when a train journey goes awry, inevitably not an unfamiliar experience, I filled in the delay-repay forms online, stating I had arrived more than 120 minutes late and was entitled to a full refund. A few days later I got a reply. It was not helpful, and it certainly did not send me a refund. Instead, it said that

‘Our delay repay team have looked into this and passed your information to refunds as you have stated you did not use the ticket to travel. If this is the case, you would be entitled to a refund and not delay repay compensation. The refund would be the responsibility of the original retailer as they would hold the funds from the original sales transaction.’

and told me to contact Greater Anglia who run Cambridge Station. I immediately replied pointing out I had indeed travelled – to nearly Letchworth and back – but had not arrived at my London destination. Several days later I got a reply saying I had to fill in a paper copy of the application since I needed a refund. So, I did and, as required, sent in the original ticket attached to the form.

A while later I got a letter stating, in essence, that they suspected me of fraud because

‘we have found an identical claim on our system’.

Not that the word fraud was actually used, but that was the clear message. Burying my anger with the insinuation I again did as asked to do if I suspected this judgement was ‘in error’, and attempted to fill in the online form – again – only to hit a brick wall as now I didn’t have the ticket (sent with the hard copy form) with all its requisite numbers on and so couldn’t proceed to the bit where I could have explained what the error was (namely, they had my previous application on file but had refused to repay me on the back of that). So I emailed to the person (or rather anonymous email address) pointing out what had happened and why I couldn’t fill in the online form again. They then came back to me saying, oh yes they could see the ticket and because I’d bought it at Cambridge I had to apply to Greater Anglia. But of course I didn’t have the ticket, they did, so I couldn’t apply to Greater Anglia as I pointed out in my next email

Their next reply was, even more helpfully, to the effect they didn’t have the ticket (!) but I should apply to Greater Anglia. I was, as you can imagine, getting pretty cross by this point about six weeks in. My replies were getting more and more acerbic as I pointed out that yes, they had already admitted they had the ticket and here was their email saying so. This time they noticed that, gosh, they did have the ticket after all so they would ever so kindly forward it to Greater Anglia. But I only received that particular message 24 hours after an email from Greater Anglia (who by this time had transcribed the date of my attempted journey to a month later; luckily this did not seem to impact on the exchanges as I feared it would) who helpfully pointed out

‘We have been unable to approve your claim as the train that delayed your journey was not one of ours. The train was operated by Great Northern.’

And that they, Greater Anglia, would forward my claim to, you guessed it, Great Northern. As a consequence I could immediately reply to the latest Great Northern suggestion that Greater Anglia would sort me out with a refund, by emailing back a copy of the latter’s reply saying they had sent the ticket back already to Great Northern. I do hope you’re following this…..

By this point I was more than cross. My next (and thankfully last) message said

In reply to your message of today, please see this message I received yesterday from Greater Anglia. They clearly think the problem is yours to fix not theirs. Will you please, finally, send me the refund everyone seems to agree I’m owed. The cost of your company’s time in all this faffing around will be exceeding the cost of the fare you owe me.

Still quite mild really, but it has had the desired effect. I think this time the email must have been forwarded up their chain of command since, for the first time I got an email from someone who gave me their full name and did not append the job title of ‘Customer Relations Adviser’ to that name. Whatever, it worked.  They have admitted that

‘We have looked into your claim and we can see that you are entitled to 120 minutes or more compensation.’

Indeed, that’s what I said from day one. I am not sure that being thanked for my ‘patience and understanding throughout the process’ is either adequate or accurate. I am not feeling patient, nor do I understand what absurd processes they thought they were following, let alone why they thought they could push the charge onto another operating company. I fear their understanding of ‘rules’ is about as good as that Punch cartoon of 150 years ago. However, the ‘cheque is in the post’, or so they say. I haven’t seen it yet….

 

 

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