So there I was. Having spent 10 minutes trying to work my way through one of the worst forms that usability demons have ever conceived of for some legal issues at a certain governmental body, I hit the final “submit” and get an error message that the submission had somehow failed. No idea why, of course, please contact technical support. The following is the actual conversation:
Support: “Can you try again after clearing your temporary internet folder?”
Me: “I am not sure what you want me to do, to be honest. I have a browser, which has a cache, although that should not matter because this was the first time I visited your site. I don’t believe there is a temporary folder for the internet.” (What I was actually thinking was: “You want me to go through that awful form AGAIN?”)
Support: “You could try restarting your machine and then try the process again with a brand new form. Do not use a saved form. If the problem persists, please provide the reference numbers you are working on.”
Me: “It was a brand new form, but I am not sure what restarting the machine is likely to achieve. Are you perhaps assuming I’m running Windows?”
Support: “We only know that restarting a computer or trying with a different computer sometimes clears this problem. Possibly, this will help even if you are using something other then windows.”
Note how they know that trying this sometimes clears the problem. So apparently people have been having issues before and not always did the tech support resolve the issue. Go figure.
In any case, I cannot believe I’ve just been HYTTIOAOA’d.
