Housing

I finally decided to bite the bullet and apply for a council house. This is made much more difficult than it ought to be by bureaucratic thinking and incompetent web design. The website and the various systems is constructed from the point of view of the council - it's all in their language, laden with jargon no normal person uses. No thought seems to have been given to using the language of the people who have to use the system. And I'm quite highly educated, and tech-savvy so I ought to find it easy. But I don't.

There is huge amounts of writing on the screen which is not optimised for easy reading but labours on in bureaucrat mode - long lines of text stretching across the screen. Half of what is there is unnecessary but has to be read anyway to find the bits you do need to read. This is one of the basic errors that web designers make. If you are a new user there is no guidance, no step by step procedure to follow - the procedure is spelled out long hand, and you must extract it and conceptualise it for yourself.

Registering is a nightmare. The process is convoluted and confusing. The screen says one thing and does another. . In fact it is a model of poor web design. If you don't have all the information you can go back and complete the registration at a later date (though the screen says you can). The phone drone asked for my password so that she could try logging in, but what is the point of having a password in that case? I had to email the extra info (My NI number) to an email identified only by initials (no name, no words) and ask that they advise me on progress. So it's now totally out of my control.

And the advice given at different times is contradictory. Thanks for that especially.

And then at the end I have to do all the leg work to get a place: getting a council house has been outsourced to the people who need housing. And for someone like me this places a heavy burden on me at a time when I really don't need that.

And when it comes down to it there are 100 people on the list for every place offered. I'm hoping that my diagnoses will mean that I get my own place soon.

I don't really want to leave my home of 10 years, but I don't think staying here is tenable any more.