Please do not write below the line | Hacker News Reader

Please do not write below the line

bbctvlicence.com

362 pointsdcminter325 comments

I worked for an old company that had a lot of old processes and paperwork. Many bits of paperwork had a "do not write below the line" type areas. I always wrote something ... nothing ever happened.

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...

In a similar vein, I put an ill fitting jacket on a coat rack when I started my current job in 2012. We have moved offices twice, and the coat rack and jacket have followed me across both moves at no effort of my own.

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.

Only a fool rearranges the objects in a tech sector professional's office. You never know which of them is of vital importance to the continued uptime of the payroll server.

This lesson brought to you by a mashup of Chesterton's Fence and The Sorcerer's Apprentice.

You moved WHAT?!

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!

That’s why it’s called software engineering.

We build the best Rube Goldberg machines - they take out payroll when the mouse trap falls.

I left a pair of sandals in the shower room at work (a shared space) way before the pandemic. We stopped having a desk there, and I stopped coming in other than for a few social events. Then the office closed, and reopened. I came back for a coffee and went in just out of curiosity. The sandals were there, still in the same corner. Now they're home with me.

If it helps, I'm entertained

Coat rack story: I once bought a cheap wood coat rack at the drugstore for $5 or so and brought it into the office to place at our "pod" of desks as only a few coatracks had existed in that office.

Later that office was being closed down to move into a smaller building and all or most of the office furniture besides the desks (cubes would imply actual walls) was priced to be sold to anyone who wanted it. I found my coatrack moved to that sale area and marked $20. (I just stole it back.)

>I found my coatrack moved to that sale area and marked $20. (I just stole it back.)

how many times have you gone through the potential argument with them in your head?

Many! How did you know?

Your jacket deserves justice! I left a post it note above a doorway in an old office about 15 years ago on my last day. I ask friends who still work there and it’s still there today!

Kudos to 3M for that adhesive!

i was amazed!

I left a job about ten years ago, leaving behind a desk with a computer and various piles of paper and bits and bobs. That company then moved offices, and my desk moved with it, computer, papers, bobs and all. I got occasional updates from my former colleagues about it all still being there. It lasted years!

Thanks for sharing this. Made my day a bit brighter

That's a pretty beautiful story to me: what you meant as a joke unintentionally became art because of the way others interacted with it.

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!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_inertia

My favorite thing when moving at the big co that owns my co is that they give you these stickers for desk items to show up... whatever you put the sticker on comes along to be by the desk. WHATEVER YOU PUT IT ON. The movers just do what the stickers said.

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.

The company I got acquired had a huge software library. On the way out on the last day at the old company, I put my cube number on every box that had software in it. It all went to my new cube, and when ever someone asked for an old manual, I would fish it out put their name on it and deliver it surriptishouly the next morning It took more than a year for the product manager to figure it all out, and by that time, they figured that all the software was too old. So ... I simply asked if I could have it all. They said o.k. I took home a box every day for more than a month, reg cards and license keys included. I sold every scrap.

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.

WHATEVER YOU PUT IT ON.

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!

Apparently it’s the same way if you work for the military. The movers show up, pack _everything_ into the truck, and it ends up at your new home a week or two later. You might not want that sandwich meat or ice cream any more, but it’ll arrive all the same.

> The movers just do what the stickers said.

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.

Somewhere in the rules of acquisition, the river flows many many ways.

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.

At my last move I'd set aside a bunch of cleaning supplies, to clean the apartment after the move was completed.

The movers binned the lot.

I realised this only after they'd left.

I was quite displeased.

There is something about this that makes the neurons in my brain just a little bit happier.

Many bits of paperwork had a "do not write below the line" type areas. I always wrote something

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."

Oh sweet Lord one of my proudest moments at a college that I used to work for was the getting to know you thing. The last question was always a "fun" question. Mine was why don't they make planes out of the black box material.

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.

I had an interview once where they asked "can you describe yourself in one word?" and they disliked my answer of "no".

I like to think Steve Jobs would have respected that ... a little, even if that makes them hard to work with.

https://youtu.be/s4Cz49MLh4o?t=143

Chesterton's menace

Clever. Chesterton's fence, for the non-Tamarians among us. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton

(Tamarians is a Star Trek reference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darmok)

I immediately realized what "Chesterton's menace" alluded to, but you lost me at 'Tamarians' (thanks for the explanation!)

I guess I could start calling such a situation "HPsquared and schlauerfox on Chesterton" : - )

I mean, it is similar in spirit to a LOTO (lockout / tagout) lock, no? Except without the who to contact bits, perhaps.

"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.

The most baffling thing here is how the hell did the author get the organisation to respond, on topic, multiple times? In my experience conversing with various entities that are supposed to provide customer support, absolutely anything outside of an extremely narrow set of vetted topics with prepared answers and especially anything technical gets ignored and receives an irrelevant response at best.

TV licencing in the UK is administered by Capita.

Their contract is unlikely to allow queries to be ignored, and the people receiving the queries are likely to have targets to resolve "tickets" (queries) within a particular time / to a particular satisfaction.

If the query doesn't tick a particular easy-to-answer box, they'll use the best form answer available in order to "resolve" the ticket and meet their targets.

On-topic? Every reply seemed evasive to me.

(Regarding how he got them to reply at all, this is required by law of public authorities.)

Hilarious that every time, they responded in a way that was technically on-topic, but totally ignoring the actual questions being asked. Like someone found one word in OP's question, then mindlessly recited a random form response associated with that word.

this is, legitimately and without any exaggeration whatsoever, almost exactly how nearly everyone I speak to IRL as a homeless individual interacts with me. There are a few here and there that absolutely do make an attempt to have real discourse and actually discuss in context, but by an overwhelming majority, most of them just take the (to borrow from a response) SLM approach.

life is exhausting sometimes

I assume they’re not really paying attention to you, like if you were a child vying for attention. You’re not likely to run into many salient points speaking to someone who isn’t tracking the basic things an adult should do.

Not an uncommon experience on, say, HN, to draw an arbitrary example.

A Small Language Model...

If this happened today, I'll bet there is a LLM.

Reading their replies felt awfully similar to how LLMs get stuck in loops, repeating the same patterns over and over.

Chatbots from the time before LLMs.

To me, it didn't come across as deliberately evasive. It came across like tier 1 helpdesk not really understanding how a query fits into their pre-defined categories, and trying to be helpful anyway without really understanding the problem.

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/

Except that you might be missing the key fact: the letter is just a letter. It’s not a form that requests information from the recipient, and the recipient is not instructed to return it. Scanning it would be pointless, because all of the information on it was printed out by them!

Ooh! I wonder if most of the letters they send out are forms (expected to be returned), but all of their letters are on the same paper-stock, which is pre-printed with the (intended for forms) "don't write below" message.

Evidence in favor of this theory: the "don't write" message is in red text. It's cheaper to do two (or more) passes on one high-volume print run - and then single (B&W) impressions on the smaller runs for each individual letter or form - than it would be to do multiple passes for each and every order.

The support staff wouldn't be privy to these sorts of economic optimizations, so no wonder they couldn't give the guy a comprehensive answer.

Might be to do with when this happened, 2006-2007. He did have trouble getting them to respond on topic though.

I saw another example the other day of how things used to work. If you wrote to the UK government in the 1980s to ask (or complain) about their policy towards apartheid South Africa you received a personal reply addressing your points in the context of the government's policy [1]. Presumably, letters to other departments were handled similarly.

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-...

Vote Tory 2029! They’ll fix it this time around, they promises.

I am assuming because the BBC is a government organization? I am not sure about the UK but where I come from the government is legally required to answer your request. They have to. Doesn't mean they'll answer your question but they'll answer something. (plus they have to confirm reception/delivery and stuff like that)

The BBC is independent, and funded by the TV licence.

The TV licence scheme is _administered_ by Capita on behalf of the BBC. Those responses are coming from Capita.

The website has a page where it disagrees with that belief, and argues that TVL and the BBC are in fact the same organization:

http://www.bbctvlicence.com/TVL-BBC%20hiding%20of%20identiti...

Where I said that the BBC were independent, I was responding to the parent thread which said the BBC are a Government organisation. The BBC are independent of the UK government.

The BBC are responsible for TV licencing, and they delegate (outsource) that activity to Capita. The day-to-day interactions, such as the emails from the website, are with Capita's support service, acting on instructions from the BBC.

Except its complicated. The licence fee is effectively a tax, with criminal consequences for non-payment.

It's from 2006, before organizations realized that there were lots of trolls willing to dedicate themselves to wasting other people's time over bullshit.

…which is somewhat ironic in the context of TV Licensing which trolls the British public en masse with its relentless and unnecessarily aggressive communications.

You guys could decide to fund the BBC in the sane, default way of taxing everyone instead of the asinine approach of trying to tie it to usage at any time.

These are dated 2006-2007. Customer support was still a nominal value at the time.

Because it's government. People in government jobs often sit around half the day doing nothing because they have so much spare time. Case in point: me, right now.

Don't they need to rearrange their Spotify lists?

Likeliest situation is all their stationary destined for send outs have the line; and in situations where the line serves no purpose it does no harm to leave it: so there is little use in having additional process around completely blank stock.

They could have told him that though if it's the case, and the mystery would be solved. But there obviously wasn't any desire (or more charitably - time) on their end to really look into the reasoning or even understand the question.

----

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!

They replied a day later:

  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.

The thing is, Lego is a "nice" company, and they care about their image. Answering obscure question the best they can goes a long way, people will be more than willing to share their anecdote. That's great publicity, and all you need are a few guys answering emails, most of them are likely to be copy-pasted for the most part, people are not that original. And if you get a truly original question, it may take a bit more time, but the impact will be greater, and I am sure employees have great fun finding these bits of trivia.

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.

The only thing I would say against this is that sometimes that kind of curiosity can help the business itself as well. For example imagine a situation similar to the post except that it's someone's job to manually write the equivalent of "Please do not write below the line" on every letter. Sometimes little tasks like that can waste time for years before someone finally asks 'do we actually need to be doing this?'

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.

More importantly, they don't need to be nice and/or care to be successful.

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.

Something that goes to show how unnecessary much of it is is how I've found a staggering difference in paperwork between various US states. Registering a car in New York is equivalent to securing a mortgage with pages and pages of forms and a bill of sale and verification of insurance etc., while in New Hampshire you just show up with the title signed over to you and that's literally it, that's literally all you need to walk out with plates.

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".

I have a wonderful memory of eating a snickers bar with my Dad as a kid, and deciding to call the comment line (1-800 number) on the wrapper. I was probably about 6 and just wanted to say that I liked their candy bars. The woman was very nice and took our address so they could mail us some coupons for free snickers bars.

While we're here, does anyone happen to recognize the camel's tune?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKpD-KkaBHc

We never worked it out.

Google's audio search tells me that it's a stock sound effect: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=2wLKlWPkcOM&si=Sle4B04wAoV...

https://secure.dewolfemusic.com/page/digiffects_sound_effect....

It appears to be used or sampled in a couple of songs (by Anna Maria Jopek and Boozehounds), but these date in the 2000s so can't have come into the camel from then I suppose!

I assume none of the Shazam-alikes can make any sense of it?

Yeah, they don't recognise it - or at least Shazam doesn't.

That's wild to get a real response like that. Bravo to Lego.

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 :(

That is an amazingly competent response. Every company should aspire to that kind of depth, if a toy company can manage it.

I cannot find it, but I once sent an email to johnnie walker to ask for the music for what is arguably the best ad I ever saw (except for think different). They correctly answered, though the answer was the music is original and copyrighted, and thus I could not get it.

I humbly suggest: 3M Thermo-Fax https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZVYRMu6Q9k

The problem is there’s no “they”. Just an underpaid government contractor manning the email inbox, asking around “hey why do the letters say this?” and responding with the bare minimum.

Capita would probably reply to a customer inquiry with this level of care and attention if appropriate.

Individual license holders are not customers, though. The customer is the BBC and its executives who administer the contract paying Capita huge amounts of money to extort people on their behalf.

Oh you just wrote below the line

Ha! I made the same guess in a sub-thread a bit further up. You (and the sibling poster) deserve credit for beating me to it.

I agree, and I doubt the support munchkins would know anything about stationery purchase practices, which explains their befuddlement.

Careful, this is what I suggested below and I'm already being punished for it.

It seems the most likely explanation to me!

The purpose seems clear to me from the explanation provided. Here's what I read between the lines.

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.

But OP was not planning on returning the letter, so it would never be scanned.

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."

Why would they waste ink to print this ? If he doesn't return the letter, then it doesn't matter...

Or it's a template that they use for a lot of things, many of which are intended to be returned, and nobody took the step to remove it since there is no harm in leaving it.

Also:

> Replies to letters are of course common whether they're expressly requested or not.

Or perhaps it is in hopes that some unwitting fee-dodger mails back a flyer with "Bugger all is what you'll be gettin' for license fees, ya bloody parasites!" scrawled across it. As long as the faintly-printed address information below the line is intact, de-anonymization is possible. Note how they kept asking him to send it back REGARDLESS.

A "TV License" is one of those things I alway assumed people were making up to satirize the claims of over-regulation & bureaucracy in the UK.

Finding out it was real was a mixture of hilarious and sobering.

The BBC is prized in the UK, and rightly so. Most national broadcasters have strong public interest provisions but the Beeb has a history and culture of strong independent journalism, incredible childrens and family output and acts as a mainstay anchor to support a creative industry.

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

I appreciate state TV content and watch it regularly. But this argument just doesn't hold water. The service is so wonderful that they had to make it a criminal offence not to be a subscriber? And surely an "independent" TV station would have to be one which is not completely controlled by the state.

It's only an offense if you watch live TV [1]. They could have just lumped it in with your taxes, like they do in many other countries with state TV, but this approach in theory lets you opt out, even if they like to check up on you all too regularly. I suppose one downside of the BBC approach is tax is usually proportional to your income, while the TV license fee is not, and in fact you need to pay it even if you have no income. We had great games of hiding our TV in the closet as students whenever the license people came down the street.

[1] https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check-if-you-need-one/topics/t...

> hiding our TV in the closet as students whenever the license people came down the street

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.

What happened to the vans with antennae that scanned for operating TVs (there’s an IF oscillator in there I guess) to find unlicensed receivers?

It’s not a criminal offense not to be a subscriber… it’s a criminal offense to pirate their content without being a subscriber.

Pretty much the same as using Cable TV or Satellite TV without paying for a subscription. I don't see much difference between paying the BBC and paying Comcast.

In the case of Satellite TV, in the 1990s there were companies that sold decoder boxes so you could use a dish antenna without paying the Satellite TV company. You'd pay the pirating company instead. Lots of cat-and-mouse games involving changing encryption methods.

The bbc has been in a state of cost cutting as the Tory government of past 15 years has consistently throttled the licence fee as “punishment” for not being state controlled enough (ie Tory’s feel the BBC is biased against them

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.

How much taxpayer money is wasted on the accounting, the enforcement, and the scary-sounding letters? Wouldn’t it be better if the government just gave taxpayer money to the BBC directly?

You mean "how much money is given to people to do those things"? Because the money doesn't magically disappear in the pockets of "big beeb", all those tasks are performed by people who get paid for that, drawing an income and then spending the money they earned by economically participating in society.

There is no money being wasted. Although it might certainly be a case of paper being wasted.

The UK government/BBC is happy to give £91m/year to Crapita to administer the TV License [0], and there are a bunch of other contractors [1]. Almost 100 million pounds wasted that could be spent on programming, but instead go to private businesses. Instead, the UK government could just directly fund the BBC out of taxes. Even if it might require a small increase of the tax rate, they could save on the enforcement and tracking.

[0] https://www.capita.com/news/capita-announces-five-year-exten...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_Un...

All the money being spent on enforcement is being wasted, if the alternative is just to raise general taxes by the same amount and fund it from that.

So yes, of course there is absolutely money being wasted in this comparison.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

Perhaps we should also have a mandatory fee paid to the thumb twiddling association? They too will be happy to be employed after all.

I used to think this, but it's no longer true. BBC radio is pretty good value. CBBC is valuable in having an ad-free service for children. But the rest of terrestrial BBC is .. tired. It's not really changed since the advent of streaming services and youtube, which have eaten its audience from younger ages.

And BBC politics is awful. Question Time is full of planted audience members. BBC journos give softball interviews to their friends in the Conservative party.

Personally I'd split the BBC into National Archive (all the material before 2000) and BBC Ongoing, and make the latter into a normal private company which sells streaming subscriptions. And abolish the absurdity of the TV license and its often oppressive enforcement against the very poor.

This a thousand times over. And don’t forget the 8 entirely advert-free radio stations featuring music, live sport and current affairs too.

That's probably an argument in favour of having it a fee instead of buried in taxes, so people raise hell if they suggest adverts.

Meanwhile the Canadian CBC is buried in taxes and has as many ads as any other station.

fwiw I think the BBC has become way too captured by culturally dysgenic rich kids (who else can afford to work for almost nothing in London) and is terrified of being seen as elitist (so won't really educate)

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.

Unfortunately this is no longer true. The quality of the journalism is in serious doubt. One such example: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-myth-of-the-stolen-c...

In addition many articles focus on individuals which offer a skewed perspective. I stopped using the bbc news app after noticing I was only occasionally enjoying the long reads, and even then I don’t want woke politics snuck in

It’s not just a U.K. thing. Many European countries have something similar, although it might be called something else.

It’s a form of tax that pays for public service broadcasting, including radio stations.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence#

In Japan there was an infamous political party focused on getting rid of the hated TV licence system:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZG95grO-vc

In Japan the vast majority of people stopped paying their TV license after a string of NHK scandals and there's no penalty for failing to pay either.

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.

The penalty for not paying the TV license is dealing with their harassment specialists (aka fee collectors)

There's a great, and somewhat terrifying character relating to this, the "NHK Fee Collector" in Haruki Murakami's 1Q84.

Some people actually voted them into office as a joke and they turned out to be a bunch of racists with some really awful views and were overall absolute shite politicians. Who could have imagined?

Pedantry time! At least in Germany, the "Rundfunkbeitrag" is not a tax, but more like a fee. Taxes go into the overall budget of the collecting party who then uses a part of the budget to fund something. The broadcasting fee can only be used for the broadcasting system and does not go through the country's budget. This means to increase the broadcasting budget, the fee has to be increased and it can't be subsidized by increasing the budget without increasing the tax.

Yes, but the UK is the only country with a license ridiculous enough to offer you a 50% discount _if you're blind_.

Although, yes, this sounds absurd, it's worth noting that the TV licence pays for the BBC and the BBC has extensive radio (and web) offerings not only television.

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.

and audio description[1]!

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] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_description

> you don't need a license of any kind to listen to the radio.

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...

It sounds weirder than that to me:

> 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?

People who can’t see their colour TV pay more than people who can’t see their B&W TV.

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

Weirder still, the discounts stack! So blind people can benefit from buying a black-and-white TV for an additional discount.

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...

Do the discounts stack? If you’re blind should you just buy a monochrome tv and pay £28?

Since the switch to digital, presumably there’s no longer and signal for B&W TVs.

this is making me want to buy a black and white TV (or grab a monitor and set it to always show in black and white) just so I can buy the monochrome TV license for giggles

That's... not what https://www.gov.uk/find-licences/tv-licence says at all.

If you're blind, you almost certainly qualify for a free license.

The TV license is certainly bit ridiculous, but being legally blind doesn't necessarily mean you can't see at all, just you fall below the legal threshold where it's judged that poor sight will interfere with your day-to-day life. Lots of people registered as blind can still watch the TV just fine even if they won't be able to see the detail.

The threshold is a lot higher than people think. I would be at the level of legal blindness without my glasses. I use my phone without glasses daily. A small laptop screen without glasses would be alright too, but desktop monitors are too big.

Of course, to be considered legally blind, your vision has to be that bad with the best correction available. (Below 20/200)

That makes sense, a blind man only uses half of the signal.

Don't want to pay the full amount? Simply get a black and white television, now it's 70% off.

I mean, TV is an audiovisual medium. Audio/Visual. 50/50. Blind people can still listen to the TV (though arguably not have half the experience). The real question is if deaf people get the same discount.

Many European countries are worse about it than the UK; even people who do not own a television are required by law to pay.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence

The absurdity in the UK is that it's a License fee and that there is this whole absurd enforcement system. In other countries it's a tax if you don't pay it, you are essentially not paying your taxes. I am OK with a universal tax for a universal service even if I don't use that service. What I am not okay with is fraudulent threatening letters, weirdos creeping in the bushes trying to see if I am watching TV and goons showing up at my front door to collect what they think I owe them.

Had a white van with huge antennas parked out front for a few days when they were refusing to believe that a large share house of young people didn't watch TV. This was in 2015. We didn't own a TV nor watch.

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.

I lived on the Isle of Man for a few years back in the 90's. The white van would be spotted on the ferry coming over and a small notice in the paper would appear. Everyone hid their TVs for a couple of weeks, until the paper said the van was back on the ferry.

It sounds so farcical now, in our age of ubiquitous surveillance capitalism.

I doubt what you saw was a TV licensing van in 2015. They stopped doing the van stuff in the late 90s / early 2000s.

Even if they could “detect” TV in your house they’d have no way of knowing if it’s a live broadcast or streaming/on demand.

It may have been an OB van or something else.

It's the same situation in German except they removed the TV requirement since the broadcasters put up token online content that you can watch/read on your phone an surely everyone has one of those. So no more visits from cunts trying to get you or your co-inhabitants to admit that you have a TV because ist now a 100% mandatory fee but it's still not officially a tax though and therefore collected by a non-government entity who have had to rebrand due to how unpopular they are.

When I was studying at the university, I shared a privately owned house with some other people. We did not have a TV license, but I wanted to buy a big screen TV to use as computer monitor in my room.

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.

I remember that in Poland electronic repair shops offered companies removal of the TV demodulator from TV sets used as monitors. That was necessary for the TV not to count as a TV receiver and thus not to generate the fee liability.

I think there also were some large cases where a company who owned a car fleet had to pay for the car radios.

Finland requires a radio license fee for taxis, or at least did 21 years ago:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/dec/07/andrewosborn

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2542291.stm

This fee is hot topic in Germany. Our French friends also enjoy ARTE[1] but seem not to suffer anymore from this ridiculous fee. Actually I’m surprised that the Swiss fee is even higher, despite everything in the Swiss is expensive.

[1] Big parts of our public television suck. But ARTE is awesome!

    * Borgen
    * Occupied
    * Mit offenen Karten
    * Karambolage
    * …

PS: ARTE is watchable outside of France and Germany in a lot of countries in Europe. Poland, Spain, Austria, Netherlands, Czech and so on.

I don't like being forced to pay for ARTE no matter how much you like it. I don't think this kind of entertainment has any value.

Occupied is outstanding, and available in the U.S. on Netflix.

Yes. Netflix seems to “import” public television series from Europe into their paid subscription.

I didn't find it on Netflix, but it seems to be available on Amazon Prime Video.

While the public television may suck, it still pays for the only real Independent news coverage in Germany. No matter what you think of the ARD or ZDF and their management boards, the work of the Deutschlandfunk and regional broadcasters is outstanding and a pillar of a free democracy.

I hate having to pay for distribution licenses for soccer games, but if that ensures continued support for high-quality journalism, so be it.

So independent that they parrot the ideology of the ruling parties. If you want to pay for them then be my guest but I'd rather not.

> I hate having to pay for distribution licenses for soccer games, but if that ensures continued support for high-quality journalism, so be it.

You sound like you're in an abusive relationship. Get help while you still can.

DLF is the other high quality program aside from ARTE!

Regarding the content, it is for all and it is fine that 90% are not interesting for me. I struggle with the selection of news presented by ARD/ZDF, missing positiv news.

Soccer is interesting for many but I don’t get why the stream it live and remove it afterwards from the archives. If the organizer doesn’t want public reports with images I would exclude them. More time for broad reports about other sports (cycling, chess, esports…).

As a UK resident and TV owner (who does not need a license), I wouldn't even mind that much if I was required to pay just for TV ownership. It's the "enforcement" system that's utterly broken (although I have no idea how it compares to other countries).

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.

What is the reason that you don't have to pay?

I don't watch broadcast TV or other such TV-license-related services. My TV is a glorified computer monitor slash media player.

that seems fine to me. whatever they want to call it, if it applies to everybody it's just a tax and they're using tax dollars to fund some TV content and/or infrastrcture. that's all totally normal.

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.

The whole scheme seems like something an American would come up with: paying for public services with regressive user fees instead of broad-based progressive taxation.

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.

Well, first they wanted to tax everyone a bit to pay for the BBC. And then someone said that would let the government easily pressure the BBC by withholding funds. And then someone said let's let the BBC collect it's own tax then. And someone else said that would be illegal to make people pay for the BBC if they aren't actually receiving any services from the BBC. And so here we are. So they wrote in this provision that in practice exempts precisely zero people but everyone tries to chase after anyway, contorting themselves through hoops to make it apply.

"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.

In Sweden there was this whole thing where you apparently had to pay even if you only owned a laptop.

In France you pay the copyright infringement tax on every hard drive / SSD / storage you purchase. But it’s still forbidden to pirate movies.

* Slaps 22TiB SMR drive * This baby can fit so many Linux ISOs on it.

It is not "copyright infringement" tax. It's called a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy and it's a rather common thing, at least in all of Europe.

Yeah, Austria had the british system for a while, but after everyone started streaming (because the content is better and prices are actually cheaper) they changed it so every household needs to pay.

Now I'm forced to pay for old sitcoms, astrology shows, soccer stuff and other useless things I don't watch anyways...

So, basically "how tax works"? You pay into a common good, whether you use it or not.

It's basically a whole parallel tax collection system, which is truly nuts. Like the administrative overhead alone surely outweighs any abstract concerns about independence from government, which doesn't really exist in the UK anyway.

This gets raised every charter renewal and they always find the administrative overhead of e.g. collecting Netflix subscriptions, etc. is pro rata higher than the overhead for the licence fee.

I interpreted the parent as suggesting "just pay for it out of general tax revenue", which makes a lot of sense to me. No additional administration and enforcement required.

This is how Australia's public broadcaster is funded. But it means politicians directly decide its budget, which makes it a political football.

The lines that really got me in this post were:

> 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’s weird. They don’t have any actual authority, so if they turn up you can just say “No”.

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).

depends on the system, austria for example used to say if you don't have a radio or tv you do not need to pay.

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.

Same here in Norway.

What's when more mental is that they are essentially all funding state propaganda agencies and so you're literally paying to be propagandised.

Not that much of none state media is really that much better to be honest.

We all pay to receive propaganda, be it governmental or not. A private TV channel will spread the ideology of their owners, and it is usually an ideology that is useful to them.

The purpose is psychological to attach a monetary value to the government TV channels, which makes the viewer consider them valuable and therefore trustable.

No. It really isn't.

Oh it gets weirder in Germany! See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beitragsservice_von_ARD,_ZDF_u...

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.

> A Licensing officer may call at your property not to collect the letters but to check that you are not watching a TV.

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.

They wear a shirt and tie. No weapon. You don't have to answer the door to them. You don't have to let them in. However they are generally lieing scumbags who suggest that they are allowed in.

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!

It's a horrible situation which I am convinced preys on the vulnerable.

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.

Sounds like a waste of public resources. Are you supposed to pay if you watch live TV over streaming services instead of using an antenna?

This is such a broken and dystopian situation. The UK is such a nanny state.

> you don't need one for YouTube and Netflix

Not strictly true, if you watch television channels live over YouTube you need one

https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check-if-you-need-one/topics/w...

We had those in Austria (they changed it so everybody is forced to pay for that now...). They basically have no rights themselves, but they pretended to do and even try to force you to allow them to enter so they can check that you have no TV receiver (including the built in ones in the TV) and say that they will come with the police and a search warrant if you deny them. It doesn't even matter if you have no antenna or no coax cable.

I find the thought that government officials would routinely carry weapons is massively more dystopian than anything the BBC can come up with.

You can be sent to jail if you do not have a licence, although it is rare

They wear the same uniforms that police detectives usually wear.

It's not just the UK, many countries have a government-run TV network, and they want that network to be subsidized only by the people actually watching TV, not random taxpayers who don't benefit from it.

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.

> they want that network to be subsidized only by the people actually watching TV, not random taxpayers who don't benefit from it.

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.

It's a tax but for some reason making it separate from the normal tax system makes it harder for the government to force political views on it... even though the government could easily pass a law saying "the board of directors of the BBC shall go to jail unless all reporting favours the Tories"

I think that's actually a reasonable point of view. The Brits I know have a feeling of ownership towards the BBC that they don't towards other public affordances.

...Apart from the NHS, that is. Which hardly prevented the Tories from sabotaging it for private profit.

Maybe the Conservatives (or their donors) didn't care quite as much about the Beeb? There's not a lot of money in it, and the gestures they did make towards it seemed to keep it from exposing too many of their other "projects", or maybe it was toothless all along. I dunno.

Still, it's an excellent broadcaster - still, in my opinion, the gold-standard in the English-speaking world - even if (perhaps) diminished from what it once was.

At least it’s optional in the uk if you don’t have a tv. In Germany you have to pay it no matter what

In Germany, you cannot even legally listen to the radio without such a license (GEZ). It's also slightly more expensive than the UK TV License, coming in just under Netflix' premium plan (while offering mostly shite in return).

To clarify: currently, it doesn’t matter what you actually do (listen to radio, own a radio, own a TV…), everyone has to pay, unless they are exempt (due to low income, other social security, or being deaf and blind at the same time). So it doesn’t matter if you listen to radio or not. You (or the household you live in to be exact) has to pay.

That's correct. It's sufficient that you in theory could listen to the radio, and it is assumed that pretty much everyone could.

In Germany, many people went to jail for not paying it.

It's equally hilarious and sobering travelling to the US as European, turning on a TV and finding more advertising than programming.

You don't have to watch those ads or TV for that matter. With the licensing fees on the other hand you do not get a choice.

>Finding out it was real

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.

Worth noting that the service is mostly advertising free.

I learned about it when they knocked on my door (UK). Said I didn’t have a TV to which they replied they’d like to look around inside to confirm. LOL no.

It may be funny but it's one way of funding public broadcasting which is, at least to a minor degree, independent of government interference.

Oi! Ave you got a loicense fer dat TV there mate?!

> loicense

Should obviously be spelt loicence.

You've never had the misfortune of discovering a Cat Detector Van camped outside your flat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5MnyRZLd8A

Yeah, it’s pretty annoying.

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.

> Publicly funded media is a great thing to have

Depends on the kind of media.

Educational content? Sure.

News? Not going to be impartial so I'd rather be able to pick my poison - otherwise it's just propaganda.

Sports? A waste of money in my view and the state should not decide what kind of entertainment gets to exist.

Inane talks shows with hosts taking home ridiculous salaries which are funded by extorting money from people who are barely able to pay for their basic needs? Unjustifiable.

> News? Not going to be impartial so I'd rather be able to pick my poison - otherwise it's just propaganda.

Why can't publicly funded media be impartial?

He also collects and displays all the previous letters he's got from the BBC: http://www.bbctvlicence.com/

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.

Last letter is from April 2024 and says it’s the final stage! Something was about to happen but no update!!!!!!

Wow, these letters are extremely pathetic and unbecoming for a government agency. I would have expected the BBC to have more self respect than this mafia LARP.

Please don't get me started on these guys.

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.

Just reminded me of how they used to get into University accommodation and try and catch people in every room

I used to live in a shared flat, and they sent individually addressed letters to each numbered room in the building - which, to my amusement, included the room number of the toilet.

That might be a comment on the quality of modern TV, perhaps?

You got a license for that bike handle, mate?

Sometimes archaic things persist indefinitely in formal communication. Multiple organisations remind me I will need to install Adobe Acrobat in order to read linked PDF documents in their electronic communications.

The best thing to do with these is to write "OK" below the line and move on with your life.

But then the government has a copy of your handwriting and may be able to use it in the future to incriminate you in some other setting.

Write it with your non dominant hand. Or your foot.

Truly a perfect mystery. Perhaps at one point letters were expected to be returned, and this feature of the letterhead has been copied over the years without thinking?

The OCR statement is confusing. It speaks of a customer manager trying to pass the buck down the line as quickly as possible

my thought was that they perhaps have to accept returned letters informing them of the lack of a TV at the address, but in a sort of dark pattern they don't specifically say that in the hope that you use one of the other, less administratively expensive options listed in the letter.

The explanation is that this contracted out to Capita, which is the go to outsourcing company for UK government for tasks where a capacity for self reflection would be a disadvantage.

This comment made my day.

On the main page of the site, there's a scanned letter shown for every month, but it ends on April 2024. Does anyone know what happened to the author? If it weren't just tv licensing, I'd say it were worrying that there's been silence for the past several months after receiving such threatening letters.

Wasn’t there a Simpson episode when Lisa was a cigarette sponsor and used her position to tell people not to smoke? They were able to fire her because Homer wrote “ok” in the ‘do not write below this line’ section of the application form. I do wonder if in theory a form could be invalidated for that reason if they really, really wanted to.

Whoever runs this website is my personal hero. TV licensing enforcement practices are utterly ridiculous.

The people who you contacted don't understand any part of what the customer facing interface to their own job which is entirely usual. Its entirely possible that there was at one time instructions for return of the letter on an envelope that the party responding hasn't actually seen in years. They like a lot of people exist in a tiny silo with limited information outside of a tiny scope.

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.

The author of the page is not the submitter (me). Not sure who you're addressing here.

I initially thought this was concerning emails, because for whatever reason, I've very recently noticed an uptick in "Please do not write below the line" a lot more in emails I receive, presumably to encourage top posting or perhaps for AI email ingestion? Anyway, apparently a strange coincidence.

This is done by a lot of customer support and helpdesk systems that one would almost consider “legacy” that are certainly not related to AI in any way.

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).

Sadly. I'm already at the top of the scale, unless I want to go into management (I do not) or change workplaces, but I appreciate your optimism. :-)

you mean the zendesk ## Please do not write below this line ##?

Ironically, I haven't noticed the Zendesk one and a lot of these appear to be from conversations with people in corporate, but perhaps they're running their email messages through some tracking system.

Please do not write below this line.

———————————————

Please have not written above this line.

Remember, temporal paradoxes are not covered by your insurer.

This sounds like something the Announcer voice from Portal 2 would say.

hey wait, what would happen if I wr

RIP yawnxyz

This text is above the line. Please fix your orientation and cease writing below the line.

below this line.

I love silly, pedantic, obstinate stuff like this. This was a very funny read!

Then you’ll love this guy https://27bslash6.com/missy.html

Sometimes silly stuff stays around for years because there isn't anyone obstinate enough to question it. Good to have a little check on reality every now and then.

I used to be a TV-free non-license-holding resident and found the constant accusations of criminality from "TV Licensing" (the BBC) infuriating. So I'm pre-disposed to be sympathetic to his crusade. Nice to see others enjoy it too.

On the surface, this absurdity is entertaining, but it's scary, like, proper actual _SCARY_ because the lack of.. sense, is so all encompassing. It tells the story of how it's simply impossible to get beyond the surface, beyond the dummy front. It reveals that there is no sense to be found. For a TV station, it's not _THAT_ bad, but this type of senselessness is all around us, in large companies, in government systems, in hospitals and on construction sites.. It's a cancer in modern society that has unseen, but grave consequences. This is how we will eventually manage to eradicate ourselves, and in a way, we've deserved it, because we allowed it to happen for so long. (Yes, I spoke with an ISP lately, it brings out the best in me)

There's a fantastic film about TV Licensing called The Duke, I highly recommend it: https://inews.co.uk/culture/film/the-duke-review-jim-broadbe...

> 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.

Would be nice if the article had an example of the entire letter. The tiny sliver of image at the top of the article leaves very little context.

If you go to the home page, you will see they have collected scans of these letters for every year since 2006. Most likely they didn't expect anyone to go direct to this page

Yes, I submitted this sub-page as I thought the puzzle might interest (and amuse) the HN crowd. I'm sure the vast majority of people arrive at the site owner's main page though.

Looked at the main site and, oh my goodness, they are very, very intimidating and threatening to get one to buy a license.

As this website showcases there's a huge variety of these letters and they are clearly thrown together cheaply by people trying to make things official looking and scary. I wonder whether the line is simply an easy way to make things official looking. Or perhaps even they once did have something to return but the designers have continued to copy and paste it forward with not connection to any actual process.

I was really hoping for an answer at the end!

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.

If you look up some of these letters you'll see they have the quasi-official-looking things you'd otherwise see on scam letters, like a stamp that says "Enforcement Visit Approved" with a signature on it.

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.

That would be really funny if true. You're totally right about the stamp part.

I think there's a pretty reasonable explanation here, which is that "Do not write below the line" is a genuine instruction, but not for the recipient of the letter.

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.

> OCR is terrible at handwriting generally

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.

Because a returned letter must be associated with an account / account holder to be processed.

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.

> Because a returned letter must be associated with an account / account holder to be processed.

But they didn't ask for the letter to be returned at all.

Undelivered letters could be returned to sender.

In which case… there would definitely be no need to instruct to not write anything below the line, as nobody would have opened the letter.

If only they knew the fate of the letter before sending, then

Of course not, but they could have and that explains the use of data to associate a returned letter.

It's a form letter. In the event it's returned you want the data, regardless.

My guess is that they scan the letters that are returned by the post office and hence they don't want anybody writing below the line. I guess that they used to have a problem with squirrels opening up the letters and scribbling below the line. However, they seem to ignore the fact that squirrels can't read.

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.

Good news everyone - I was able to follow the link in the letter, successfully fill their form, and confirm with the TVL that I do not need a TV license.

We’ll see if they send mail or jackbooted inspectors across the pond to confirm.

You’re going to have an inspection van outside your house any minute now ;)

Amusing that you can fill the form out with (presumably) foreign addresses.

It's pretty obvious that they use this OCR system to track sent letters that don't expect a reply as well as forms you return and they've just used the same template in both cases.

Scanning the ones returned as undeliverable. Those would of course not have been opened and therefore nothing written on them.

It allows the sender to confirm they did indeed send the document. (As opposed to someone else)

I imagine they just slap it onto everything as a kind of Vogon poetry.

From their main page, it looks like all of the letters with this line have something below it which is redacted.

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.

I've never felt so much like I'm reading a passage from The Trial aside from while reading the novel itself.

What was the thinking behind making a de facto compulsory licence fee for something that is available to everyone anyway? And then having a big annoying system for enforcing and investigating payments? Why was this seen as preferable to just paying for public television out of tax revenue?

Random association: Somewhere, I saw "leaves the top third of the first page blank without being asked to do so" as a sign that the person you are recruiting as a spy already works for the opposition. Maybe that goes for the bottom of the page as well. =)

Now I'm curious: Why leave the top third of the first page blank? For spy stuff?

My guess would be that he opposition trained their agents to leave space on the first page of their reports for archive file numbers, estimates of source reliability, notices about which consumers the information has been shared with, that sort of thing. (This was probably around 1950-1960 or so, so everything on paper, probably often handwritten.)

Seems like a series of letters sent by someone with cognitive difficulties?

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.

> Seems like a series of letters sent by someone with cognitive difficulties?

No, just someone who isn't a complete NPC.

You'd think the government would make its propaganda free to watch.

Shades of UK comedian Joe Lycett: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Gkiw7zpULo

My guess is that undelivered letters are returned to the sender and scanned in. Below the line will be a barcode or similar UID that identifies where the returned letters came from.

What does the full letter look like? They only posted a picture of the Santander one.

Is there really no space for writing in, anywhere on that letter, above the line?

The author shares the full letter (in fact an archive of many years of letters!) on the homepage at http://www.bbctvlicence.com/

The people at the BBC have failed the Turing test.

Reading this correspondence gives me a little PTSD about every time I have to deal with one of these bureaucratic organisations.

This feels like what arguing with GPT-2 is like

"Please do not park next to our nondescript White Van" would suite just as much.

They don't use non-descript vans. They want you to know who they are. Now, whether the vans can actually detect anything is a different matter. Some believe they are just a visual deterrent, and don't actually do anything beyond looking scary.

The point is they have as much to gain from encouraging people to believe they actively use "TV scanners" and you can't know when they are about with their vans as saying nothing.

Cynically it gets your auntie talking, brings TV license to front of mind.

It's doubtful they ever actually did such a thing.

That is my understanding. They certainly had a demonstration device that could deduct a local oscillator, but it is suggested it was just PR.

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.

> To return an enquiry letter to TV licensing, simply return it.

Some strong Scarfolk energy here.

I say try writing "drop table;" at the bottom and post it back. :-)

The writer assumes that "you" refers to him or her. It's possible that the request not to write below that line is part of a document template. The instruction is for the template users not to put content below there, not necessarily to document consumers. Though the template could be used as a basis for letters that do have to be returned. Basically nobody in the entire workflow chain should put anything there, so that if that space has to be OCRed, it will reliably work.

> 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.

I love this country so much...

I assume it’s just lazyness

below the line

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