Early And Often

05-03-2011

Now, unless you've been living under a rock for the last month, I'm sure everyone knows that General Election 2011 was held recently. Held, completed, with new monkeys already selected and promising the Earth and the Moon to overturn things.

We will believe it when we see it.

But one thing that has never and more than likely will never change is the lazy bastards in certain offices meant to serve the public.

See, coming up to election time, in fact a good few months before election time, myself and the lady friend decided to check that we were registered to vote. I've been registered to vote ever since I've been able to and have never not voted in anything. Democratic right and all that, I'm going to exercise it. The only thing is that since moving out I've had to head home every time to vote. So I needed to update the old records to be able to vote in Raheny.

Herself, being from the Northern part of Ireland, wanted to make sure she was all set to vote in Dublin on the day of.

What did we do? What you are meant to do, we filled in the proper paperwork and sent it off with nearly three months to spare. Like good, democratically minded, people of the country.

With two weeks left to vote both of us, unknown to each other, decided to check the online tool to see that we would be getting our polling cards. The lady friend, according to the website, was not even registered. Me? Well strangely enough I wasn't registered either. In Raheny or Lucan.

This was very annoying. To her because she wanted vote and to me because I had been able to vote last time and yet this time had been removed.

So a phone call was made. A phone call to an office full of lazy incompetent bastards with a "not really my problem attitude". The general gist of said phonecall was this.

Lady friend: Um, we sent in the paper work two months ago so that we would definitely be able to vote.

PSW: Oh yea, about that, well see it seems that a lot of people want to vote this year, so we haven't been able to process your paperwork.

Lady friend: So you are saying what? That we can't vote because you couldn't do your very simple job?

PSW: Yea, we get that a lot. Don't really care either, thank you for the call.

There may be some paraphrasing in there but it really did go like that. We were informed that strangely enough people wanted to vote this year and because the office workers were too lazy to process everything they were denying some folks their democratic right.

See, it's this type of Public Sector worker that gets the whole sector a bad name.

Anyway as annoyed as we were it was surprising that two days later both our polling cards arrived. Although how is a mystery as they had the wrong address. Not just a digit or two off, it wasn't even close to our address. Like the old days when Sun Microsystems HR sent my contract to "Derek Power, Ireland" the voting card folks had thought that "2 Raheny" would work.

There isn't even a two in our real address.

So we could vote, happy days. Except when I dropped out to the mother figure then the next week to return her laptop I was semi-given out to for not voting. Being a bad democratic type and failing to use my vote. Instant defense mode, I had voted.

"How, without your polling card?" I was asked. To which the mother figure produces my polling card, with her address on it.

Yes folks, thats right, the PSW in the office are not only too lazy to send out your card they do not remove you when you request a change of address. You just get created as a new entry. Meaning that I could have done an Al Capone and voted twice in GE11, just for shits and giggles.

So the overall mystery is this: The website that the government says you should check to see if you are registered to vote, has it ever worked? Has it ever contained information that was accurate? Since I was clearly registered at my mother's address still and apparently registered somewhere in Raheny yet was not registered at all according to the website.

In this day and age such clerical mistakes should not be allowed to happen. It might be time for a certain PS Office o be replaced or retrained. Starting with how to properly change the address of a person when requested.

Blue_jester




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