DWP

As the Gorse Fox approached his state pension age he has been contacted by the DWP  and given the option to claim it (he discussed this before).

The first time he tried he was directed to the Government Gateway site where he had to fill in some information and then, on pressing "Continue" the site said it  couldn't complete the request.

The Gorse Fox left it a week and the following Saturday went through the same process again. Again it failed.

He left it until Monday and this time it worked fine. His interim conclusion was that the Government's 24x7 DWP website only actually works during the week. The fact that it had worked meant that a secret activation code would be sent, by post, to the Gorse Fox. This would enable hime to complete his registration with DWP and claim his pension.

The code duly arrived.

With a degree of excitement** the Gorse Fox sat down this morning to complete the process. He logged in and again followed the process. This time he was able to confirm that he had the activation code. The code was entered and "Continue" pressed. At this point the page crashed with an HTTP Error 500.

By this point the Gorse Fox was getting a bit hacked off with DWP's ability and thanks the Lord that every time he was invited or requested to go and work on that account - he resolutely refused.

He phoned the help desk and after 12 minutes a human clicked onto the line and asked him what the problem was. He explained. "Are you using Firefox or Chrome?" she asked. "Safari" he replied. There was a long pause. "I'll just check" she said and then told the Gorse Fox to close the browser, wait for two hours, then open up a private browser window and start the process again.

The Gorse Fox waited.

With a degree of trepidation he opened the private browser window and started the process again. Voila, this time it worked... and that annoyed the Gorse Fox even more. What sort of Government site is that badly written that you have perform such unnatural acts to get it to work... but doesn't even give you a hint in advance that these unnatural acts are necessary.

At least his pension is now activated and payment will start at his next birthday.

** Excitement is, of course, a relative term.