"Holiday" is a relative term

Our honeymoon ended quite a while ago but the holiday is sort of stretching out and ending in a very indistinct sort of way. We have some kind of work to do now, mainly involved with setting up the house and keeping on top of groceries and things, but nothing we can get fired from.

Centrelink keeps us relatively occupied and moderately bemused as we deal with setting up Youth Allowance. At once I want to rejoice that a system exists that thinks I deserve to be paid for spending most days at home watching cricket on TV, and complain bitterly at how messed up and inefficient that system is. That feeling is compounded by the fact that their internal computer system and associated website is fairly well messed up. And not even in terms of its reliability, but in terms of its basic design from the end user's perspective. All the staff we've dealt with have mentioned how the "system" requires them to do strange things, but also commented how normal that is - we've received confusing automatically generated letters which have been dismissed by the telephone operators with a simple "Oh yeah, the computer sometimes sends those out, we'll just get that fixed up for you now." Of course though it is just managing to keep everything working just well enough that no money will be spent on it to redesign it. Oh well. Maybe next government.

Blogging may resume more regularly now as our net connection has stabilised a bit and I may remember a bit more. It's not like you really wanted details of my honeymoon or anything!