Several children’s stories involve the protagonists overcoming all sorts of problems and challenges, which is one reason why I wanted to share a couple of intriguing bureaucratic challenges set for my wife and I by HM Gov, in case it inspires any of you with ideas for characters who might deal with quandaries in an imaginary, rather than a real context. The second reason is because I would love to know how you would have dealt with a similar seemingly insoluble dilemma.
My wife and I now live in France and needed to apply for a form from the UK NHS called an S1. This means that as Brits our healthcare is covered in France. After we’d made our online applications – the process of which seemed to go quite smoothly – we were told that we would be sent a unique 6-digit code that we would need to use to download the documents.
The codes duly arrived, and we logged on to the site again. We found the space allocated for typing in our unique code and were faced with the statement, ‘Now enter your 8-digit code’.
So what to do now? Take a gamble and add two 0s to the beginning of our 6-digit number… or at the ending? Maybe one at the beginning and one at the end?
Instead of taking a gamble, we found a need help section and hoped we could communicate our problem to the powers that be.
We found a page that required our details, beginning with our surname. Well, my surname is Way, so obviously I started by typing in a W. As soon as I did so a message popped up below the box which said, ‘Must be a least 5 characters’.
In a 3-letter name? What do we do this time? Add two # marks? Two extra Ys as though someone had stood on my toe while saying my name? To add to the irony of the situation, we couldn’t even give my wife’s maiden name as it’s Bell.
Could it be that those of us with 3-letter or 4-letter long surnames make the most complaints and this is the authority’s way to filtering us out? Could this be another one for the conspiracy theorists?
Answers on a postcard please. PS No more than three million characters!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Recently published, “Spell Binding Stories UKS2” contains stories, sketches and poems to support the learning of spelling for juniors age 9 – 11
ISBN 979-8297102361
No comments:
Post a Comment