apografi.gov.gr

This post is related with the devastating failure of the EU member state of Greece to produce a decent web service.

My mother is a civil servant (a teacher in the public high school to be exact).
The government has required all the civil servants to participate in a census of some kind (in order to find out who is getting paid by it, I suppose).
This can only be done through the web service at the site http://apografi.gov.gr.

But people are not able to access the web service whenever they want until the deadline (contrary to the popular belief that this is a fundamental requirement for every web service). They must do it on a certain range of days, which is defined by their taxpayer identification number (ΑΦΜ, a popular number in Greece, unique for every citizen) [e.g. the 25th of July is reserved for those whose ΑΦΜ ends in 5].

OK, this is shortcoming #1.

Shortcoming #2 is much more important, since #1 can be interpreted by the fact that the government wanted to avoid heavy loads on the day that the deadline expires.
The failure #2:
Let's assume now that Tes is a civil servant with an ΑΦΜ that ends in 2 and she must enter the web service between the 1st and the 15th of July (the numbers, dates and names are random, any resemblance to an actual person is purely coincidental :P). So, being a diligent and hard working lady, she decides to go to the site in the 4th of July (the date is, again, random). She tries to do her chore, but to no avail, as the server doesn't function well (the lists of the prefectures won't load, her address won't be automatically located, the lists of possible public sector assignments won't load). She tries the next days and still isn't able to access the service.

That's all.
Ta ta,
elias a.k.a. diluted