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Armed with nothing but a council tax bill and misguided optimism, I entered the hellscape of modern local government digital services. Three hours, four accounts, and two browser crashes later, I emerged changed — but not victorious.
Welcome to the modern British customer service experience, where chatbots understand nothing, phone menus were designed by Kafka, and the phrase 'your call is important to us' has become the cruelest lie in the English language. We map the complete psychological journey from mild optimism to existential crisis.
Armed with one simple health question, I ventured into the labyrinthine digital estate of Britain's public sector. What I found was a parallel universe of broken links, contradictory guidance, and chatbots that appear to have been trained by someone who'd never met a human being.
Once the undisputed king of social news, Digg threw away a throne that Reddit was more than happy to claim. The story of how one website managed to alienate its entire user base overnight — and then spent the better part of a decade trying to win them back — is one of the internet's most instructive cautionary tales.