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Useless British Gov Websites

Billions of our taxpayer pounds have been spent on totally useless form filling websites. I am typing this post while waiting for the twentieth time (yes I really mean 20th) for the damn gov website not to time me out. Again. They need an up-to-date photo of me on my drivers license. Fair enough. Years of having to complete endless forms for everything imaginable have savaged the way I look, amongst a myriad other grombles of course. In fact should I ever manage to complete this particular process, I will have aged several more years than the photo I am trying to upload. So it's instantly going to be out of date. But that's not why I'm grombling. What really gets my goat is the dreadful state of our central IT. Why on earth doesn't the government sack every bastard in Cardiff and all the other agencies employing millions of bean-counters, form-stampers and useless IT consultants, and give the whole bloody mess to Google to sort out? They already know far more about each of us than our useless civic administrators will ever know, so give in now. Let the bastards have it all so we can at least rely on something working properly. And think of all the money we'd be saving even if we end up having to pay all those civil servants chunky pensions. At least the IT consultants won't get fat at our expense.

And while I've been typing this the blasted hourglass on the gov website has continued to churn round.... just like it did when I tried to use it last month, and the month before that. After patiently filling in page after page, I get to the very last bit of the bloody form, and there it sits, churning away, then times out. If that was my company providing this sort of service I would be infinitely ashamed. I'd instantly take down the site, put up a holding page apologising to visitors, and instruct the IT chaps to drop everything else they're working on to fix it. Customer satisfaction doesn't exist in direct.gov.uk. There's not even a bloody number for me to call to shout at a civil servant. They're all in hiding calculating the days to their pension no doubt. They're certainly not user testing their bloody IT, that's for sure.
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