Entering into the Clicsanté website to get a vaccination appointment opens up a task akin to Sisyphus rolling a stone up a hill only to have it roll down for eternity. The system is ass backwards. It may have been designed by “Ding et Dong”. 

At first you have to select a service, which these days is getting a Covid vaccine. Then you have to choose a region by entering a postal code. Fair enough. So far so good. A page of warnings comes up to inform you of the restrictions for your region, another page which reminds us of the curfew…well, DUH! Then you press “continue’. I timed out at least 20 times before I finally read the time out warning which suggested I press “refresh”.

Don’t! 

I did. Back to square one. If you get past this point, you choose a venue…. If you get past this point, which I didn’t…… I finally gave up, but nevertheless Sharon persisted!

When I did this exact same exercise for my flu vaccine, I would choose a venue only to be told there was no availability at that venue…..why not blank out the ones that are complete? Why not just list places and times available? Ding et Dong really did their work!

Back to today.

Sharon got past the wall (several times) and was able to pick a date and time, but while she was writing out the info…. phone number; my mother’s maiden name and my father’s first name; and what brand of monkey wrenches we have used by date and time, weight and colour….the time would be taken and like Sisyphus she’d be sent back not one step, but all the way to the beginning. The system could be set up better nest ce pas?

Booking a hotel or an airline ticket (remember when we could do that?)on-line was a snap compared to this craps shoot. You would reserve a time and have a deadline for completing the transaction. Not here… it still shows as open even if you clicked it and the unannounced race is on. Let’s say you type slowly…. Sharon and I are still relatively dexterous and not strangers to computers, but she timed out 7 times from the last stage. I timed out 20 times from several levels below.. She had “error” and “refresh” messages that sent her back to square one. Sharon was using both her iPad and her phone. I was just using my laptop. Multi-platformed and still the difficulty…Imagine people less agile, less aware of the digital world….further along on their biological clock….

I could feel Sharon’s and my anxiety level and blood pressure level mounting with each try and on my part there were multi-syllabic multi-linguistic and perhaps transcendent and inter-galactic swear words coming out of my mouth. 

Sharon finally got through and I now have an appointment, so, yay!

It should have been easier than that. I am left with the same feeling I had when I took a day off to buy Bob Dylan tickets which were to go on sale at noon. I was in line at eight A.M. and there were about 50 people ahead of me. Should get great seats, right?! Wrong!!!!! I could not believe how shitty the selection was for the highest priced tickets. It seems the scalpers and on-line preferred customers got first choice. It was like being the last table to be called to the buffet table at a wedding. Injustice is everywhere!

There are up sides to this, is I have an appointment and will have a better chance of riding out this pandemic safely.. Sharon now knows my phone number off by heart and my medicare card as well, and the birds don’t repeat my swear words….