OT: tick boxes

[Bill Wright]

As discussed elsewhere. Today I was faced with three choices:

1. Do your duties as a carer have no effect on your own life?
2. Do your duties as a carer restrict your activities so much that your own life is seriously affected?
3. Do your duties as a carer mean that you have no time at all for your own activities?

I wrote "None of the above. My duties as a carer obviously impinge on my own life, but the impact is not great. Your form is badly conceived. The options have gaps between them, into which I would think many people fall."

The woman from the social rung back. She was quite snooty. Said something about 'the difficulty of processing information that wasn't standardised.' She wanted me to opt for one tick box or the other. I was having a bad day anyway. She got under my skin. I'm afraid I said, "Instead of me altering my life to fit your form, why don't you alter your form to fit my life?" She rung off, eventually. The whole thing is a farce anyway. The help we need is means tested anyway, so we won't get it. Basically if you spend your life pissing your money against the wall and shirking any sort of work, when you get old they throw every damned thing at you, but if you've been prudent and kept a few quid in the bank they won't give you a bean. There's people round here that have been on the rock and roll almost all their lives, down the pub every night, Sky, decent holidays, and now they're old and disabled (due to smoking mostly) they get wetrooms, ramps, stairlifts, the lot. What do we get? Sweet f*ck all.

The one thing about forms that really gets me is when they want you to fill in a form on line, but the form has been put together in Word by some council pillock who hasn't learnt how to use 'table'. So she's made the cells the 'right' size by doing a lot of returns in each one. So when you type into it the bloody cell extends downwards off the page. I went to the trouble to convert one blank form to a bitmap, then filled it in using a graphics programme, then converted it to a pdf and sent it. They said it was in an unknown format so they couldn't open it.

Bill

[harryagain]

The above is the reason why people have off-shore bank acounts. To keep the governments thieving hands off their money.

[Brian_Gaff]

Been there got the t shirt. One grouse I have is that its all set up for physical disability, and not visual impairment and so the forms standard answers need qualification. ie can you walk xyards unaided. Hah, course I can but A no idea where I might be afterwards, and if cluttered floor might trip over, and if told to walk to get a bucket, would never know where it was etc. As for web forms, yes, they are supposed to make them accessible,. Most are not. Many get the tab order of the table cells all to c*ck so you cannot actually figure out which buttons or checkboxes go with which question or choice.

Most of the designers of forms seem to have no idea what they are actually trying to achieve. I did speak to an adjudication officer a while back who basically said, that the forms are all broken as those designing them did not listen to the experts like himself, so often they had to get extra info from the client afterwards.

Words fail me. If I was doing such a cocked up job as these form designers and got it so wrong for both sides of the problem, I'd expect a size 12 up my backside into the gutter, but seemingly this is not the actual case. Brian

[Brian_Gaff]

And another thing. When I was forced to stop work as no bugger wanted to employ a blindy, I used my redundancy money to pay my contributions so I'd get my old age pension rights. Now I hear the Gov is going to give everyone the pension in any case, so I now would like those thousands back please, which i need not have spent. Do you think I might get them? Of course not. Brian

[Another John]

[For once] I sympathise with you entirely Bill. I think the underlying message is that they'd prefer you just to bend the truth (not to say lie) "like everybody else": that way, the machine runs smoothly.

So tick Box 2. That will slide you smoothly down the production line to the next form (and batch of truth bending), and ultimately you will emerge triumphant clutching your very own wet room (or whatever).

The fact is that the whole system is so gargantuan, and the benefits pouring out in such a torrent, that they cannot afford staff to interview at a personal level -- which is what is actually needed. They'd rather just pay out.

A bit like (nay: exactly like) Lloyds Bank setting aside 10 billion to pay PPI compensation: does anyone ever check any of these claims? Has anyone every checked to see if they've now paid out more than they garnered originally? No: too "expensive" to check claims; "cheaper" just to keep on shelling out because "that money has been budgeted".

By the way, spare a thought for the poor bastard at "the social" as you call it. I know someone who works in DWP, and who's has been moved to working the phones on the "absent fathers defaulting on maintenance" lines. His job is to contact these people and persuade them to pay what they have been legally judged to owe; some of them are homicidal at the other end of the line. My friend is a gentle, sympathetic soul, who used to enjoy his job analysing state pension entitlement for people just coming into it. He's been moved to these phone lines, and they're told: when you come in the door, you're on the phone, and you stay there; and this is your "target" for this week: make sure you hit it. I am worried that my friend is going to fall seriously ill as a result of this inhuman system (the whole lot, including management). And thus ... he may well ultimately, and absolutely against his wishes, become forced to claim benefits.

What do we do?

J.

[newshound]

Perhaps we need a dedicated newsgroup for grumpy old men!

[GB]

I have some sympathy for the lady at the council who had to enter your form onto the computer. She had the same problems as you over the form.

My daughter has been applying for jobs as a teacher, and I helped her with some of the dross part of filling her qualifications and similar details in on the forms. First, you'd think the schools could cooperate by having that part of the form standardised, but NOOOOOO! Second, you have no choice but to fix the form as you type into it - turning on over-type helps. Otherwise, you don't get an interview. It is, as you say, truly pathetic.

[Jethro_uk]

In that case you *can't* walk unaided. There's a certain twisted logic behind these questions and you need to think outside the box (no pun intended).

[Clive Page]

I agree with your complaint - all these surveys have categories which are too limited. Just an example: I have sometimes found tripadvisor.com useful in weeding out truly bad hotels or restaurants (you have to be very selective in reading the comments, discarding the 10% highest and 10% lowest and taking a median of the others, also discarding all commenters who have only done a tiny number of comments), but I find their rating categories very unsatisfactory. They are Excellent Very Good Average Poor Terrible

I have found very few places to be "excellent" and unless a place has given me food poisoning (only once so far) have to choose between "very good" and "average". But most places fall between those, so a rating of "good" might be appropriate. But tripadvisor doesn't allow me to do that, so I have to make an arbitrary choice.

The same thing happens in an awful lot of tick-box forms, I find.

[Capitol]

Seems just like Essex county council who recently published a pdf of street light changes (ie turning them all off) which wouldn't open.

[David.WE.Roberts]

Ummm.......I thought this was it?

[Huge]

*grin* I applied for a job once (Head of IT at Bedfordshire Police, as it happens) where they wanted me to fill in the application form online, it was a Word document, and had been "designed" by a similar retard. I did something very similar. I may have made a snotty remark about using open standards as well. Needless to say, I didn't get the job.

[bert]

In message , Capitol writes

Keeping you all in the dark

[Theo Markettos]

That's an American thing, I think. eBay penalise sellers who get less than

5 out of 5 stars, even though to a UK person 3* would be 'perfectly adequate'. That means as a buyer you're essentially forced to give sellers 5* unless something went badly wrong.

Theo

[tony sayer]

Rejoice that we have the best in "piss poor management" in the entire world;((...

[Roger Mills]

So do I, but only limited sympathy. She needed to take on board the fact that the form is inadequate, and feed that back to her management.

[Roger Mills]

I've no real problem with means testing the help which they provide. But what we found when my father-in-law was living with us was that, since he didn't qualify for *free* help (he had some capital and a decent pension), they weren't prepared to offer him *any* help. He would happily have paid for the sort of support which less well off people got free.

Sounds as if it was designed to be printed and filled in by hand - and some idiot then used it unmodified as an on-line form - for which it was totally unsuitable. Where do these outfits get their IT staff from? -- Cheers, Roger ____________ Please reply to Newsgroup. Whilst email address is valid, it is seldom checked.

[Jeremy Nicoll - news posts]

There's a similar problem with these questions for people who can (if they absolutely must) physically walk a certain distance, but get consequential pain, fatigue etc. The DWP (for DLA assessments), local councils (for Blue Badge applications) etc don't seem to understand consequences. But no-one who is disabled can risk ignoring consequences.

[Capitol]

India.

[Mike Barnes]

But not just American. AIUI Ofsted regards a rating of "satisfactory" as not good enough.