Published Nov 11, 2009
Like any good geek, I’d rather do things online then, you know, have to call or go to an office and interact with an actual human being. Thanks to Amazon Prime, I barely have to buy any technology or home products in a store anymore. In this household, we’ve tried to do some of our governmental-interaction things online as well. And it’s been a complete, unmitigated disaster. I can say with confidence that I will never, ever, do any government-related activity online again.
The first mishap involved an online vehicle registration renewal. Having all of our ducks in a row, we paid the bill with a check online. Transaction confirmation in hand, we figured: done! Little did we know. Weeks later, well past the due date for renewal, came a letter from the state; the registration had expired. Extra fees, far in excess of the original renewal cost, were owed. A phone call — very long phone call, given that it was to the DMV — revealed that the check info we’d typed in was wrong and the transaction had failed, with no notice to us whatsoever. Expensive! And not their fault for not having told us that the earlier attempt to register had failed.
Then there was the honeymoon. We went online to put our mail on hold while we were out of town for 23 days. One might think that using the hold mail link available on the front page of usps.com would work, but, in fact, there is no functioning system behind that hold mail link! Our mail piled up the whole time, with our nice neighbor finally taking it upon herself to hold it all for us. If we lived in a neighborhood with more intrepid burglars, we would’ve had a big “steal all our stuff” sign outside our home. That hold link on the Web site? It might work, but it’s all chancy. (In fact, when asking the post office staff about this issue, one particularly ornery staffer roundly criticized us for using the online system at all.) And who’s responsible for the mail not being on hold? Not anyone at the USPS, that’s for sure.
So, that’s it for me. Next time, I’ll call a person or — gasp — go to an office, wait in line, and actually have something work. Pity I’d save money, tax-wise, if I used the online tools, but no amount of savings is worth things not working. Government web: suck it.
Weird. I have had success with online gov’t services in many areas. Offhand, I can think of:
…and, in fact, yesterday I dealt with my smog check (where the guy at the smog check shop entered my data over the net), and then went straight home, and the registration site had gone from saying I couldn’t register until I got smogged, to letting me register.
I think you may want to check your home for gremlins.
Like, maybe, Republican anti-government gremlins.
In fact, we’ve both used government web sites for all the things you have in the past, and loved them! It’s just shocking to hear that they don’t have a process that attempts to ensure that these sites work, and that it’s my problem if they don’t. Whereas, if I do it the old-fashioned way, they have a good process, and it’s their problem if it happens. Filling out a paper form sounds pretty good in that case!