Government Websites.

The internet is fantastic isn’t it? You can watch sad, lonely people talk into a camera, anonymously purchase suspicious sexual objects, and spend hours wasting time reading online comics.

But the internet can be genuinely helpful as well. There was a time when we had to apply for things using paper forms. Those days, or so I’m told, were horrible, dark times. Queues of old, smelly, unhygienic people lining up outside the local post office, fighting for the attention of the mysterious people who never come out of their glass window booths.

Incedently, if you happen to have a fetish for old people, the post office is the place to go. I'm telling you, they do it all.

However, now with the invention of the internet, such memories are a thing of the past. Now you can apply for things such as a driving license or a university application online. From the comfort of your home. Naked.

But of course things haven’t really changed have they? It’s just another façade for the same old problems. Last week I decided I would finally apply for a provisional driving license. Simple you might think. Oh, don’t be silly.

The government seem to have an affection for using bizarre, impossible to remember sequences of numbers for user ID’s on their website. They call it a ‘Government Gateway User ID’. I call it ‘A Load of Bollocks’.

However, the process for applying online for a driving license is nothing compared to the suicide inducing punishment that is UCAS, and the Student Loans Company.

Managing? Barely coping more like. And stop smiling.

With images of smiling students dotted about the website, who I can only assume got their parents to apply for them, you are innocently lulled into a false sense of security. But it isn’t too soon before you realise that you have entered into an online world of sheer pain. This is worse than Second Life. Ouch.

It would seem there is a lack of communication between the internet application form and the mindless government representatives that actually process your future. Despite doing everything the website asked me, UCAS insisted that I hadn’t actually applied properly, and then changed its mind and just decided that I hadn’t sent them enough of my personal details. Even though my identity had been put into that other great British institution – the post - months ago.

By the end of my application process, the relationship between my keyboard and I had nearly escalated into blind violence.

I know it’s easy to pick on the poor government. And I’ll give them their due, they’ve made a bit of effort to make all this application nonsense a bit easier for us all. I will remain eternally grateful for the opportunity to apply for things naked (the post office didn’t seem to like that idea) but I do think it’s about time they worked on the actual function of the sites before they put effort into making it look pretty – you can’t polish a poo (well, you can, but it’s a messy business that I’d rather not get into right now!).