Mastodawn

Gotta love government bureaucracies...

I got an email today telling me to go look in my messages. Of course there's no link in the email or obvious login on their website so I dug through my Firefox history, found the address to the web portal and signed in to look at this important new message.

The message told me I had a new document in my documents folder that I should read. So I went to my documents folder and lo and behold there was a PDF sitting there for me.

So I opened the PDF and it was a very official looking letter telling me that they had received my application and would be contacting me by mail or by the phone (or maybe through the portal?) when they actually have an appointment for me.

I just love how the Internet has made all this so much more efficient! 🙄

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Sophie Jul 1

@faithisleaping Probably a step up from the previous process where they sent a letter in the mail to expect a letter in the mail lol.

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Jeffy 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦 ❤️🇱🇺Jul 1

@faithisleaping I'm thinking of an episode of #AbFab (I do that more than anyone might realize) where Eddie has all these plastic trashy “Pop Specs” sunglasses and puts a “Kind To Trees" sticker on them. Saffy says, “How are they possibly kind to trees?”
Eddie: “Well, they ain't made outta wood!”

My point: paperless office! 🤭🤓

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Leeloo Jul 1

@faithisleaping
There is *some* logic to it.

They don't include a link because they don't want to teach you to enter your login credentials on websites linked from phishing mails.

And they don't include the content because email is not encrypted.

If only they would include the subject, so there's a chance of seeing if it's something important enough to bother logging in.

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Faith, purple-haired feminist

Jul 1

@leeloo I'm aware of the logic of message centers. But also "we've received your application and will contact you again" doesn't need that level of security.

And even if it did, there's no reason for the second level of indirection. They could send an email telling me there's a document waiting for me or they could have just put all that in the message. Even my gender clinic, with the shittiest web portal I've seen since 2010 manages to attach PDFs directly to messages and has an obvious enough link to the portal on their website.

This is what you get when you combine a government bureaucracy that still wishes it were sending things through the mail with an IT contractor that's blindly trying to follow a best practices document.