You can't always get...

It's worth recording times when the Web fails people, and they do not get what they came in for. Today I had several examples, almost as a rebuke to yesterday's post.

A man had been told at a Popeyes Chicken restaurant to apply for a job online, but he and I tried together and separately to navigate to the page on the Popeyes web site where he could apply, and failed utterly. (No, Popeyes has no apostrophe.)

A woman called me over to help her complete an application for a credit card. The page was poorly coded, so that she couldn't see how to enter her zip code. The zip code field, when selected, put the cursor to the left of the box, in a blue-tinted area. I told her to type it in anyway. She did, and was able to then submit, but instantly received a rejection message.

A man had seen a classified ad about "free money", and wanted to print out information from a web site listed in the ad. As I said below, it was less trouble for me to do it for him than for me to give him a short course on how to use a PC. It was clearly a scam. If he paid them $49.95, they would open the storehouse of riches to him. But I printed it out for him, and he left with the information.

A man wanted a comprehensive listing of health agency offices, top to bottom, from the federal level down to state and county, so that he could market a health database application. D. and I suggested the NIH, the CDC, and in Florida the AHCA, but really, such a list is not out there for free, in part because the states dispose their health care so differently. He could pay someone, like InfoUSA, to generate such a list, but no one has done it and put it out there for free.