The Anonymous Widower

Technology That Works

The postman came about five minutes ago.

He delivered two pieces of post that mattered amongst all the old junk; a new card for Sky and a Voter Registration Form from St. Edmundsbury.

The card had been flagged up on my Sky system for about a week now. A simple message just told me that the card had been posted and could I check the post.  I took out the old card and entered the new one.  It worked first time.  As it should.

The Voter Registration Card had only one problem.  The URL was rather complicated, especially as it included St. Edmundsbury, which is not the easiest word to type.  But after a couple of pages and a few clicks, I’d updated everything.  Or in my case, just told them that a very lonely man, who spends a lot of his time blogging is still alive!

Seriously though, life isn’t that bad all the time.

But both systems worked without a hitch and with the exception of the URL couldn’t be faulted.

An aside here, is that if you’re developing an on-line system, make sure that the URL is short.  There are lots of six and seven character ones available.  I even recently acquired mx73.com.  Short and memorable.

I just wonder how less stressful our lives would be if so many of the other things that we have to do in our lives were just as simple.  We’re getting there, but not as fast I would like.

One thing that works round here, is that when my wife died, the Registrar informed the council, so that I got an automatic Council Tax discount, after I signed and dated the form they sent me.  A very civilised piece of joined up thinking. 

Do all councils work this way?

And then we have the excellent system for Vehicle Excise Duty, that has cost the Post Offices so much money, as who in their right mind queues for an hour to buy it.

August 29, 2009 - Posted by | Computing, Design, World | ,

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