The family and I are planning a trip to Italy for late summer. Three weeks in late August/early September will be spent visiting the wife's relatives in rural Sicily. To this end, I have been working on passport applications for all three of us.
In order to, hopefully, avoid spending days standing in lines at a government office, I am doing as much preparatory work online as possible. The government of Canada website has an online passport application form generator that asks you to enter all of your information, and then prints out a passport application for you, already filled out and ready to be signed. At least that's the idea.
I know it works, because I have already done it once for my own passport application. Now I want to do the same thing for my wife's app. And let me tell you something. The government of Canada website can kiss my ass. I have never had a more frustrating experience with a website before. It is excruciatingly slow. I click on the link I want to open, then I go make myself a coffee, read some e-mail, play some solitaire, cut my toenails, dust my antique camera collection... Every five minutes or so, I check back in to see if the new page has loaded.
When it finally does, half of the graphics are little red Xs, which makes figuring out where to click next somewhat of a guessing game. I finally gave up and selected the option of printing out the blank forms, and filling them in myself. Ha!
The online form feature wouldn't work with my Mozilla Firefox browser originally, so I had to use IE, which I hate because it cost me hours of time reloading Windows after my system became hopelessly infested with spyware several months ago. But opening and downloading the blank .pdf documents wouldn't work in IE, and I had to go back to Firefox for that.
I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayers' money the government spent on developing this website, but couldn't they have spent some of that on actual usability testing? I'm beginning to think I would have saved more time if I had gone down to the passport office and stood in line.
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4 comments:
Sometimes technology isn't so great, is it. Sorry you're having a rough time printing off the apps. We spent three weeks in Italy. Wonderful place, even got blessed by Pope John Paul in the square.
Sounds as though you don't have all the relevant Adobe (and other?) plug-ins installed for IE. I use IE or Netscape for .pdf documents all the time. Doesn't mean the passport site isn't badly designed and the server overloaded, but some of it could be at your end. - Karen
Paul,
The power of your patience is insignificant next to the power of bureaucracy.
Or, even better:
Wave your hand in front of the surly international airport staff and confidently proclaim, "You don't need to see our identification." That'll save you all that wasted time in the first place.
You can thank me later.
Simon
http://simianfarmer.blogs.com
Wow... a trip to Italy... Cool! Having to get passports... <shudder>
http://journals.aol.com/astaryth/AdventuresofanEclecticMind
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