Which system or service do you think still seems old fashioned?

11 comments

1. Come up with this idea of:

   Press a button on the floor, and the bin for your house goes underground, and automatically goes to where it needs to go to be emptied. It comes back to you, when done.

2. Car vc5 log books, why arn’t these totally online by now.

3. The Dartford tunnel.

   My daughter and SiL moved to Norfolk from Sussex earlier this year and that now involves using said tunnel to visit.

   I went online to set up an automatic account to save having to remember to pay within 24 hours.

   I have to download a form. Fill it in. And send a CHEQUE in the post with the form to start the account.

   Needless to say I haven’t bothered as I don’t even know if I have a cheque book any more. I certainly can’t find one.

4. On prescriptions – having to go and hand a slip over to a chemist who does ~something~ for 15 minutes then gives me my antibiotics. It’s mental I can’t have it posted to me.

   My GP had an online booking system for a short while then went back to phones. Online was a tonne better, but I guess they needed to triage people who didn’t need to see a GP to some other service so I can sort of see why.

   Public transport outside London – I have to buy different tickets for train, bus, tram. Integrate them.

   Anything where I can sign up online but have to phone up to cancel. It should be as easy to cancel insurance etc. as it is to sign up.

5. A lot of education needlessly relies on paper. So much could be digital that it’s painful.

6. The legal side of getting married from having to go to your local registry office (and only your local registry office) and having to give details like your parent’s occupations all the way to not being able to play any remotely religious music at a civil ceremony (so pieces of classical music originally written for Christian services are banned).

7. The check in process at airports. Car hire processing. Hotel check in. All take longer than seems necessary in a lot of cases

8. Buying/selling/renting a house, why do we still need a slimey fucker in a cheap suit involved in the process at all, I don’t know the solution, but it feels like still using a travel agent to me

9. * School. If you were designing a system for educating children with a blank piece of paper, it wouldn’t look like it does. Primary school isn’t too bad but most of it belongs with the era of the horse and cart.
   * GPs. Made sense when people had horses and carts, but most people should just go to a local hospital and go direct to someone who knows about chest pains, foot problems etc.
   * Car sales. I don’t want some oily git in a suit selling me a car. I want it to be like Argos. I probably know more about the car than the f**ker serving me. Just let me take it out for a test drive and tell me the price.

10. Slaters still have helpful staff that suggest alterations to fit you depending on the occasion and tell you the correct way to wear it.

    They need to get with the times and hire some disinterested part timers who barely have enough time to stack the shelves let alone help you.

11. Banking—but only the big legacy banks.

    Your apps are shit, your websites are dated. If you ever require me to make a telephone call, I will close my account and never return.

    Why don’t you have modern secure MFA options? No, SMS messages are not acceptable. No, neither is entering digits 2, 5 and 8 of a PIN.

    If there are basic things with my account I can only do by trekking to a branch, well, I hope Starling, Monzo etc put you out of business.

    If your card doesn’t support digital wallets, well, you’re not getting a slice of my birthday cake.

    If I can get a bank to lend me two hundred grand solely by email when buying a house, you can help me do some basic current account admin online too. I’m talking to you, Lloyds.