Flashes of Panic

All I wanted to do was renew my parking permit. Based on last year’s experience, I remembered that I had to go to the police station, not the town hall. But this is local government, and I knew if I didn’t check ahead, I’d be making two trips: one to discover that I was visiting outside of office hours and/or didn’t have the right documentation, and another to actually get the permit.

I figured that the Medford town website would help me out. Maybe a link to the parking regulations, and something like, “To obtain a parking permit, go to the police station between 2 and 2:30 on alternate Wednesdays with your birth certificate, passport, and five forms of photo ID.” Nope. Try the “Government” link on the front page, and see if there’s anything on that page that looks remotely helpful for anything you’d actually want to know from your town government.

Remembering that the permits actually come from the police department, I thought maybe I’d find something on the police website. Nope, nothing doing. This site is a bit more 1999 rather than 1997, but is still far too fixated on what the publishers want to tell us rather than what the people want to know. There are too many links on the front page, and not enough of them give any indication of what information you’ll find if you click on them. I tried a few, hopefully looking for parking information, and all I found was instructions for how to pay a parking ticket… which might turn out to be very useful if I can’t figure out how to get my permit!

Of course, all these websites had contact email addresses and phone numbers, but anyone who has ever done phone and/or email support for software knows that the point of a website is minimize the need for customers to resort to email and/or phone calls, and the way to do that is to make sure the customers find what they need on the website. (And the way to do that… is to make an easy-to-use website!)

Finally, I put all the conceivable documentation for my car, short of the actual title, in my bag and biked up to the police station. I went to the window, where helpful signs explained that all I needed was my registration (got it) and a $10 check made out to the city. Well, that’s easy; why couldn’t I find this online? The posted hours were even reasonable. There was nobody in the office, but after a minute or so of patient waiting, a grumpy woman came up, took my registration and check, and eventually gave up a sticker and two guest permits. I use the word “grumpy,” because she made it quite plain to me that she had planned on being gone to lunch, and I was delaying that plan, and parking stickers took far too long to fill out forms for. (Why on earth, by the way, do all parking permits expire on New Year’s Eve? Has it not occurred to someone to stagger them, like auto inspections, so the entire town isn’t lined up at this counter in January to get their new stickers?)

So this ended up being a successful mission in that I got what I came for (a parking sticker), but the extra lessons were less than positive. I learned that the Town of Medford isn’t really interested in providing information its citizens are actually looking for on their websites. I learned that the Medford police department would rather be at lunch than providing me with a parking permit, and in fact they’d rather give me a parking ticket than a parking permit. Actually, what they’d really like is for me to stay home and not bother them with anything like doing their jobs, so clearly this is all my fault.

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