Last week we had our annual fire safety video in which BBC newsreader
Kate Silverton (phwoar!) pretends to work for our company and tells us, in words of one syllable, what to do in case we're too stupid to get out of a fire. As far as I'm concerned you need to do only two things in a fire: stay out of my way and get the fek outta Dodge. Today we received an email instructing us to go to our training site and update our own training records to say that we had indeed watched the video. This proved rather difficult for a bunch of fire hardened IT consultants. Why? Well, user ID is a six digit number (I would have preferred my name), password is, erm, "
password" (I would have preferred something more secure, like a six digit number) and then follow the easy to follow links. Ten screens of pure guesswork clicky pointy later we arrive at a screen which says, "
Did you watch the fire safety video?" with two radio button answers, "
Yes, I watched the fire safety video", "
No, I did not watch the fire safety video". I answered NO in spite of the intuitiveness of the site and got a "
Failed" mark against the course.
A bunch of genius web designers were paid thousands of pounds to design this piece of crap software. Quite frankly, my Grandma could have designed it better had she not been involved in a fire some twenty years ago – and they don't piss about down at the crematorium I'll have you know!
