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Canada Revenue Agency — please do better. Your web site is broken.

tony — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 21:36:38 +0000

So I saw a job ad on LinkedIn announcing that the CRA was hiring new personnel to answer phones for people with questions about their taxes. Being that I’m someone looking for a job, I decided to go to the CRA web site and submit my candidature. Several days later they still don’t have it, nor — as far as I can tell — do they have anyone’s candidature since posting the ad, and the weird thing is that they seem to be blissfully unaware of this. Let me walk you through the process and you’ll see why.

First, I went to the CRA web site and looked for the “careers” link.

I click on the Job opportunities link, which takes me to the careers page, where I see a Candidate Registration link, which I click.

In the resulting form I select that I’m a member of the general public, and click on the data privacy statement checkbox. So far, so good.

In this second Candidate Registration page (experienced UX writers will share my annoyance at having two consecutive pages with the same name, but let’s ignore that) I enter the appropriate data and click on the Next button.

And voila! an error message. “The session has timed out”.

But I did not let this deter me. I clicked on the Exit button, which took me back to the CRA front page, completed the process again, and this time… I now got a different error, “Our services are not available at this time”.

I shared this last error message in the LinkedIn ad for the recruiting drive and haven’t heard anything from them since. The ad appeared on Tuesday (IIRC) and the web site SNAFU is still there.

So, dear Canada Revenue Agency, if you see no submissions for your recruiting drive don’t conclude it’s because nobody wants to answer people’s questions about taxes. It’s because your web site just. doesn’t. work.

Maybe you guys should be concentrating to hiring people to make sure that your web sites are usable instead of obsessing about killing public sector jobs, because having fewer and fewer staff isn’t going to fix things on your end.

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Lenovo update…

tony — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 21:12:25 +0000

I got a call from Lenovo today informing me that one of the items ordered for me was on back-order… good thing I wasn’t holding my breath. AFAIK it’s the system restore disk for the laptop, which just raises further questions. If I need an additional copy of a CD/DVD I’ve already made before, I just use the image to make a new copy. Does Lenovo not know this?

I’m pretty sure this laptop has been a paperweight for longer than it’s been operating since I bought it.

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From the “dead to me” file — Technorati

tony — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 14:23:13 +0000

I was wondering about the relative dearth of traffic recently, and had a look at this site with my adblock turned off. As it turns out this was causing the page to apparently not load; what was really happening was that the page did load, entirely, but then there was a sneaky call to a web site called b.scorecardresearch.com which never loaded, so every non-adblocked call to this site resulted in blank pages and hung browsers. At least on Firefox it’s obvious that there’s a delayed call to a third-party site; with Google Chrome I just ended up with a blank page.

On doing a bit more research I found that this “scorecardresearch.com” site is an advertising beacon, which is annoying enough, but then I found out that the call is made from a script that comes with the technorati widget that was on the wordpress template of my site. As of now this has been removed, and it will not be coming back. To put it plainly, fuck Technorati, for tracking users and screwing up my site. And don’t give me any of this “it’s not our fault” crap, it is your fault. You included this third-party script call into your script, it’s up to you to make sure it works and replace it if it doesn’t. And why exactly are you tracking user activity by IP in the first place anyway?

So, Technorati, you’re dead to me.

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