not the biscuit tin

Columnist

Thursday 28 June 2012

I was excited by the important archaeological find reported under the headline "£10m Celtic coin hoard unearthed after search that went on for 30 years".

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Tom Shields

I assumed this story concerned the famous biscuit tin from which a previous regime at Celtic Football Club ran its financial affairs. Folklore has it that penny-pinching directors kept the club's resources in a McVities Assorted container.

It turns out the coin hoard story is not about Celtic and the Whiteii or the Kellyii but about another tribe altogether.The coins belonged to the Coriosalite, a Celtic tribe who, in advance of invasion by Julius Caesar's Roman legions, stashed away 50,000 silver coins on the island of Jersey, that well-known tax haven.The coins have been unearthed after three decades of perseverance by two blokes with metal detectors. It is a nice story but not relevant to Scottish football unless the two blokes use their £10m windfall to buy the club formerly known as Rangers.So I revert to Topic B which is also about coins. The meltdown in the online services of the Royal Bank of Scotland, especially its NatWest and Ulster Bank subsidiaries. There are various explanations as to how the RBS system was plunged into chaos. I like the reportage from The Sun newspaper which said it was down to a "fat-fingered newbie who pressed delete". To add to the hysteria, the mistake was made by a low-paid employee in India who hit the wrong button while trying to stop an upgrade to the system.If only RBS had asked me. I could have told them don't go there with upgrades. It always leads to problems. But if you start an upgrade, don't try to stop it halfway through. You just get bigger problems.The many hours I have spent on the phone to so-called computer experts have convinced me that most of them do not have a scooby and are taking you one page at a time through the training manual.I offer as evidence my conversation yesterday with an affable young man from TalkTalk as to why my broadband keeps collapsing. We did all the switch off, switch on, unplug, replug, reboot stuff. Then he suggested the Wi-Fi failure could be down to heavy rain or high winds. This wrong kind of weather online could make Scotland a TalkTalk-free zone.

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not the biscuit tin

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