Isn't This Bonkers Or Perhaps Its Me

[emmie]

i had to go to the local council to fill out some
housing benefit forms. after a long walk i arrived to be told there was
only one person who helps people fill out the form and he was off ill and had been for two weeks. I was advised that the forms can/should be done on line.
what if you aren't on line or literate enough to do these forms,
angry and annoyed at wasting my time, i wonder how these councils manage to employ so many, yet remain so useless.

[dannyk13]

It's called bureaucracy Emmie,

[emmie]

after a painful attempt on my part to do the lengthy forms at the councils offices, the pc kept on timing me out, i got one of the assistants to print me off a paper copy, twenty pages later i was done and done in.

[albaqwerty]

our council points folk in the direction of the library, which is great if you can manage to access a PC there for the length of time required.
(wazzocks)

[emmie]

bureaucratic be damned, they are a pain in the proverbials.

[fiction-factory]

So who helps those who struggle to fill in all the details on line. If they have a paper version they should have let you fill it in by hand as best you can then it would go in the queue with the other paper and online ones needing manual intervention.

[emmie]

alba
it was in the library, you should have seen the form
more than twenty pages long, just to see if i can get some help with housing benefit.

[Cloverjo]

It's always been the same. Even before everyone was expected to be online, anyone trying to claim benefits was sent from one side of town to the other - and sometimes a different town - and wait for ages at various offices. They want to make it as difficult as possible.

[emmie]

ff
that eventually happened because their pc system wasn't allowing me time to complete the typed form, so they finally printed me a copy and i did the whole lot by hand.
i think it finally took me over two hours to get this done.

[albaqwerty]

jeez, Emmie, our local housing benefit form is a bit like wading through War and Peace.
Resorted to going to the council and lovely lass went through the form for me.
Most pages were not applicable, my favourite Q was
'do you own any property overseas?'

[emmie]

alba
most of it didn't apply to me either, sadly i was all but undone by it all.

[albaqwerty]

what annoys/irks me is that during a period of mourning, things need to get done and sometimes by the most unhelpful folk :-(

[emmie]

alba
the funeral went off well, or as well as can be expected, it was coming home and realising that i needed to get these forms sorted out that got to me.

[albaqwerty]

I've just noticed I've typed more nonsense than I usually do.

I meant that some folk can be most unhelpful when forms etc need to be filled out.

Am glad to hear things went as well as they can Emmie xx ((hugs))

[Islay]

The problem is they don't employ so many now! They have been cut and cut until there is only one person for the job.
So perhaps you need to complain to your MP

[Buenchico]

To be fair, well-designed online forms are far, far easier to fill out than the equivalent paper forms. Anyone filling in a paper tax return, for example, has to wade through page after page of irrelevant questions in order to do so. When you do it online there are a few 'filtering' questions at the start, so that you only have to answer questions which actually apply in your situation.

It's the same with council forms. When I went to my local council offices to get a form requesting a reduction in my council tax I was, like Emmie, told I had to do it online. When I actually did so I found that the process was vastly simpler than it used to be (in the days of paper forms) because of the 'filtering' questions which meant that I could miss out all of the irrelevant stuff.

CAB staff (and some local library staff) are always happy to help people with no internet access (or limited online skills) fill in such online forms.