Choice Bad

I've long believed that choice is a bad thing, choice is an opportunity to be unhappy, to feel hard done by, to regret your choosing. Choice is also an opportunity for mediocrity, to be a jack of all trades but master of none. I much prefer a pub offering four superb dishes to any restaurant offering a confusing plethora of options, as I'm sure Gordon Ramsay would agree. And so it was that I found myself confronting the NHS's Choose and Book site. It's always made me laugh hearing politicians tell us that patients want choice. Do they? Do they really? All I want is the earliest appointment at my local hospital. But to do this I had to login to the "healthspace" website using my reference number, birth year and ridiculous password. What did this give me? A phone number for Guy's Hospital! Which I called, and asked for the next available appointment. I'm so happy. I love choice me.

Oh, I almost forgot, When I first visited the site I was greeted with the following:

We are sorry, but the web browser you are using is not compatible with the online Choose and Book service.

We apologise unconditionally for any inconvenience caused by this problem and can assure that we are working to make sure that future versions of the Choose and Book online service work in as many types of browser as possible.

So I tried IE, same message, so I had to use IE 8 in version 7 mode just to login. And I had to do all that just to find out that I had to call Guy's.