Census cock-up !
Posted by Big John on March 28, 2011
Being the good citizen that I am I have completed my census return, and surprisingly it was not as complicated as I thought it would be, so I don’t expect a visit from the “census police” anytime soon.
I took the completed form in it’s envelope along to the small postbox on the corner of my street, only to find that it was too large to fit through the slot. It’s quite a thick document (32 pages) so bending it didn’t help.
I had to visit my local post office to post a packet, so I took the census form along with me, only to find that a notice had been taped to the large postbox outside the building requesting that these official documents be handed to members of staff inside, so presumably they don’t fit into that box either.
Considering that hundreds of millions have been spent on this exercise, wouldn’t you think that someone amongst the Office for National Statistics’ army of bureaucratic prats would have noticed the problem ?
Oh! .. and by the way .. thousands of householders were unable to complete the census on line (as we had been urged to do) because the new website logged them off before they had finished answering all the questions.
… Un -BLOODY – believable !
Ginnie said
The incredibly stupid things that our governments do (both sides of the ocean…or all oceans!)
absolutely boggles my mind. And they are all usually very costly mistakes.
Jay said
Sounds about right for government work.
Gabbygeezer said
What in hell did the government want to know that took 32 pages of inquiries to find out?
rummuser said
Perhaps anticipating something similar, the Indian government decided to spend a lot of our tax money on sending enumerators house to house to conduct interviews and fill in forms. This is necessary here of course as either a lot of us are illiterate or cannot read the local language. These enumerators, I suspect were paid by the number of questionnaires they filled in as, they even surveyed the homeless and the transit passengers in railway waiting rooms!
Grannymar said
This is the first time that we did not have an enumerator call to check the information and collect the document. With all the publicity in recent years about the size of letters to be posted, surely somebody should have picked up the problem along the way.