Bureacracy, or how I managed to avoid being summoned to court for half a century until a speeding fine...

 

I like to think I'm not a reactionary arsehole. I may be a bit grumpy, OK I may be a lot grumpy but nothing annoys me more than needless bureacracy. 

Take a recent pair of speeding fines I picked up from a 20mph (!) camera while on my anniversary weekend in North Wales. A single camera was responsible for the fines, clocked me going one way, then as I did a U turn while hopelessly lost and panicky in the dark, clocked me going the other way. Fair enough and that's not why I'm here to moan, I'm here to moan about what happened next. 

Quite apart from the fact that speeding fine letters seem to always arrive on a saturday morning (destined to ruin your weekend I guess), the pair of letters were waiting for me when I got home. Four sets of letters in fact, two in english and two in welsh. 

As directed in the letters, I acknowledged my offence online. Here's where the first part of this went wrong. I responded to both on the same day, at more or less the same time. 

A few weeks later I was offered a speed awareness course. Stupidly I thought this would be for both offences (since I wasn't screaming through a 20mph zone at anything ridiculous. 27mph one way, 30 the other) I only got the one letter, and dutifully booked on my course thinking "OK consider that a lucky warning"

So I type this as I wait to take that course, but with something far worse between me and happiness. There were two offences remember/ And the 2nd one wasn't covered by the speed awareness course, in fact the only acknowledgement I got was a court summons telling me I hadn't responded to the other offence. 

Wait, what? I DID RESPOND TO BOTH AT THE SAME TIME. 

The online system (starportal - all forces apparently now use this) only acknowledged one. 

FUCKING GREAT

So I tried to appeal. Now, if you've ever tried to get hold of an actual human being on the phone you'll know that this is an almost impossible task. The summons letter had practically no details in it other than a method of settling the fixed penalty (which, again, I did on the phone via an automated 24 hour payment line since the online method asked for an offence code that was not supplied in any of the documentation surrounding the offence). Paid up my £100 and sent off my driver's license details to the supplied office address as directed. The letter gave me 7 days to respond from the date of the letter but was already 2 days late by the time it arrived. 

Can you see where I'm going with this grumble? Bureacracy, from end to end, and broken systems. 

No attempt to log in to confirm I'd submitted my original response through starportal could be completed. I could not get hold of anyone on a phone for love nor money, nor do they respond to emails. Some offices (hilariously) are only open tuesdays and thursdays between 9 and 12. What. The. Actual. Fuck. 

So as it stands I've again done as directed with no confirmation that the right thing has been done. What's the betting that I get a proper court summons in just over a week's time? I am sorely tempted to go to court just to bring up all this information and make them crawl through the logs of whatever that crappy online system was to see if they can confirm my responses. 

This is the state of our country today where even those of us who have no interest in trying to wriggle out of an offence are punished unjustly by a ridiculous network of broken systems, bureacracy and failure.