I’ve always had trouble filling in forms. Questions which the form’s designer evidently thinks are clear and unambiguous tend to baffle me. Paper forms often get bounced back with one of the boxes giving the reasons for returning it neatly ticked. (They should really add a box marked “because you’re an idiot” and have done with it.)
For instance, I’ve just made it possible for readers to post comments directly on my blog rather than having to email me. When I tested this out yesterday for the first time – pretending to be an eager first-time commenter – I was given three boxes to fill in: the name I wished to be known by (fine), a space for my comments (excellent!), and a box marked “url”. Now, I know what a url is. But whose url? Which url? What url?
In the end I ignored that particular box and managed to post the comment successfully in any case. So what was the point of this ambiguous question in the first place? And is everybody reading these remarks rolling their eyes and wondering how anyone could be so stupid as not to understand what I was supposed to put in that box?
And we’re talking about Apple here – usually a model of human-centric clarity. We all know that trying to communicate via the forms designed by Microsoft’s uber-geeks will lead to tears before bedtime and, possibly, a smashed computer (one of the many reasons for forsaking Windows-based products).
But not all forms are rendered minefields by ambiguity. VAT forms are unambiguous, yet they’ve always been a problem for me. I dread doing them because I know – with absolute certainty – that I will be reduced to incoherent rage by feelings of personal inadequacy before I’ve finished, and that the form – dead simple, really – will contain at least two clumsy, initialed corrections: I stick things in the wrong box, I transpose numbers, I add numbers up wrong, I leave boxes empty.
Why this angst over a simple VAT form? Because I don’t know what the bloody tax is for! It used not to exist. Now it does. As a business, I charge my clients VAT. I then fill out a form declaring what I have charged clients, and pass the VAT on to the government. Why am I acting as a tax collector?
And what happens to the money? What is it spent on? (Rumpy-Pumpy and the rest of low-grade bank clerks who are now, in effect, our unelected government, I suspect).
Before I hired an accountant to do my income tax returns, I used to do them myself, and generally got them right – because I know how income tax works. I earn money by the sweat of my brow, and the government takes a huge chunk of it and hands it to its client state – the unemployed, civil servants, immigrants, teenage mothers etc. – and, if there’s any left over, dispenses it to a few services that might actually benefit my family: military personnel and weaponry, transport (well, it could happen), and the prison service. (We pay for education, so someone else’s kid is riding on our backs.)
But what VAT is all about is an absolute mystery.
Of course, I could read through their website – but I can never find what I want there. And I could go to one of the “events” the authorities stage to explain VAT to its “customers” – but, where that might make sense for a sizable company which employs full-time accountants, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for me to give up a day to understand something that should be crystal clear in any case. As for paying a professional to do it for me – well, to be honest, I pay enough of my earning to middle-men as it is.
Online forms are, of course, the form-deviser’s version of waterboarding – it’s not formally defined as torture, but we all know that’s what it is.
Financial institutions have got this down to a fine art: you answer 32 questions on a page, hit “next” to whir through to the subsequent page, also containing 32 questions, but instead you’re stuck on the page you just completed.
After a moment of panic, you notice a discreet red message telling you that you’ve failed to answer all the questions correctly, or that you’ve entirely failed to answer one or more of them. You find a blank box, fill it in (your favourite colour is “blue”, say, or your inside trouser-leg measurement) and try to resubmit.
You’re stuck on the same page. There’s something else wrong.
This can fill up the best part of an hour. And of course, there’s the web-based forms which wipe all the information you’ve put in if you get one of the answers wrong and try to progress. (We’ve gone beyond waterboarding to thumbscrews). And, even then, when you’ve dried your tears and know – absolutely know – that you’ve finally got everything right, there’s still a strong possibility that, when you press the very last “Submit” button, the whole damned thing will be rejected because… well, because the system just felt like it.
We have now entered the realm of electrodes attached to testicles.
At that stage, I either give up, or hunt for a non-existent or artfully-concealed contact number, or have one of those amusing “webchats” with someone with a name like a Hindu deity who tells me that henceforth their life’s purpose, even unto death, is solely to solve my problem (but who bugger off after ten minutes and hand over to another deity). Or else it’s some fabulously perky can-do type with a suspiciously American name - “Chet”, “Candy” - who, after singularly failing to solve anything, asks, “Is there anything else I can help you with?”
But, apart from ambiguity, sheer incomprehensibility and finicky perverseness, I reckon I know the real reason for my ineptness: the people who devise these systems have made absolutely no attempt to look at the world through my eyes. They need certain information from me to feed the maws of an enormous cash-hungry bureaucracy. They use a certain internal language. It’s my job to learn their language and to enter their mental world – not the other way round – even though I am inevitably trying to give them money.
Welcome to the Age of Autism.
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