Life in Cartagena

My mobile phone operator, Movistar, sent me an email about my latest phone bill. I wanted to know when the payment will be taken from my bank so I clicked on the email link to check the payment details. I got an error message to say that the site was temporarily unavailable. This is a standard occurrence. The Movistar site fails more often than it works. I'm not busy so I decided to write to them and complain about the general unreliability and complexity of their website. Their email form made the job of complaining quite difficult. I had to choose from various drop down menus none of which were specifically about their web site. The form itself was a brilliant example of the the poor design of the website. I found something on the form which was vaguely Internet related and vented my spleen. I pushed the send button. A 404 error message came up. Web Page not found. I backspaced to have another try and the homepage came up. The homepage apologised for the general unavailabil...

It's that time of year again. Tax time. First day. The Revenue start to send out letters and SMS messages to people to tell them how they can get hold of their draft tax statement. The draft tells you what the tax people think you've paid, what you should have paid and how much they owe you or you owe them. The draft is available online. I heard on the radio that the website had collapsed under the strain of the thousands of people trying to check. A couple of hours later I was trying to get on the website to have a look myself. The particular pages had a message along the lines of "We're a bit pushed at the moment, please try again in an hour or so." It's about eight hours later now, around midnight. The website has the same message. Down for the majority of the working day then. Apparently the system was designed to deal with 100 transactions per second, clicking on a link for instance being a transaction. They had something like 5,600 transactions p...