Bureaucracy
For the last 2 to 3 weeks I’ve been working on a redesign of the State’s National Party Page. The National Party is the 3rd largest political party in the nation and currently is in government as one half of the coalition (that’s for all those non-Aussies out there). Anyway, I’m beginning to realise that the hard part probably is not designing the page, but attempting to get it viewed, approved, and uploaded to the “official location”. Here is the new site (at my web space), here is the current site.
It doesn’t help when the whole National Party network runs on a bunch of 486s (“we’re getting a new system this Christmas! Thank God for that! Oops… sorry.” one woman told me) running Netscape 2 (and you wonder why they get Javascript errors – I even catered for the soon-to-be obsolete Netscape 3, and they still undercut me). To make matters worse, the person in charge of managing the web site is on holidays… at the other side of the country (in Perth). So I had my first taste of bureaucracy – being referred to all these different phone numbers of computer illiterate people to semi-illiterate people. It also causes anxiety when you’re fresh out of school and talking to politicians (and those involved in politics). I don’t think I have had a phone conversation with anyone as important, even though I’ve “met” all these really important people through Economics at school (you won’t know what I’m talking about if you don’t go to Trinity, but feel free to ask). Finally I agreed to upload the page to their site. I think they are going to try and change their password, and once I have uploaded the files, they will change the password back. We’ll see what happens. No I’m not accepting and suggestions to put “questionable unapproved material” their site. I’ll keep you informed, of course :).
5:40pm (GMT +10.00) tomorrow 
