Needs work

The extremely good news – from my point of view – is that I now have an appointment for my first COVID vaccination.

Hoorah!

It is not until near the end of April but I have no complaints about that. The mechanism set up in BC for booking said inoculation – on t’other hand – as the title of this post suggests, needs work!

It seems somewhat unfair to cavil at such things when the splendid efforts of all those concerned are focused on helping us normal folk to be able to get on with our lives. If I do so it is because I believe that anything that potentially puts people off getting vaccinated needs to be fixed.

Herewith my experience:

Having discerned that I could now register online for the jab I followed the instructions and rapidly did the deed. Easy as pie and no complaints from me. The next step was to await a message inviting me to book an appointment.

This message duly arrived a couple of days later – at about 1 o’clock in the morning. No reason why it should not do so – and because I was still up and about I decided to book right away.

I followed the link and connected to the online service – supplying the requested details at the appropriate points. I selected my preferred location for the appointment and the service offered me a calendar from which to choose an appointment date. I took a punt and took the first date offered. A message popped up informing me that there were no available appointments on that date. I tried another with the same result. It rapidly became apparent that the calendar had not been equipped with a way of showing which dates had availability and which did not. All I could do was to work my way through them until I found a date that could accommodate me. Eventually I found and chose such a date and selected one of the offered time slots. The site then asked me to re-enter my email address – though I had already done so and the service must have know it anyway to have sent me the invitation in the first place.

I typed in the address and was told that the time slot was no longer available. Presumably someone else had booked it whilst I was typing. Doh! I had to go round this annoying loop all over again… becoming even more frustrated because the site had forgotten the information that I had entered on the first go through.

Eventually a slot was booked and a page appeared containing a QR code and a message telling me to print this code and to take it with me to my appointment.

Now, as I suggested, I was doing this really quite late at night and I was so doing from my iPad – which does not have a printer attached or configured for it. A confirmatory email arrived but did not contain the vital QR code.

OK – now I am a big boy and – as regular readers will be aware – have a long professional history in IT. I can sort such things out, but I am a lot less confident that everybody trying to book a vaccination appointment in BC will have the same good fortune.

Chaps – you are doing a difficult and critical job tirelessly and brilliantly – but do sort out these glitches so that everyone can get the protection that they deserve.

Ithankyew!…