Parents battle tech woes at ‘The Hunger Games’ town swim lesson

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Rob and Grace Butler needed two laptops, two iPads, two iPhones and some smart pre-planning to sign their young daughter up for fall swim lessons with the city of Ottawa on Monday night.

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The Butlers were among those who were able to capture a spot in what some are calling the “Hunger Games” swim lesson, the usual competition for limited spots at the city’s recreation programs.

“Our friends warned us that this was going to be a problem and that we were basically sitting on the website,” Rob Butler said Tuesday.

Like many parents who tried to log in when registration opened at 9:00 pm Monday, the Butlers discovered that the ottawa.ca website had crashed.

“The entire website went down with a denial of service, 503 error,” Butler said.

But the couple had a trick up their sleeve: a URL that bypassed the main landing page and took them directly to the course page. After about 15 minutes, their daughter was searched.

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“Oh my gosh, it was like we won the lottery. We went in,” Butler said. “It’s hilarious, but it wasn’t at the time.”

Twitter was flooded with complaints Monday night and Tuesday from other parents frustrated by the process. But there is good news for the future, Stittsville Coun said. Glen Gower. Later this year, perhaps as early as November, the city hopes to switch to a cloud-hosted system that can handle the demand for web traffic that the current setup can’t.

Gower remembers the frustration of when her teenage daughters were young.

“I was clicking update, update, update seemingly forever until I finally got into the system. And people still have to do that now,” she said.

“Instead of running the registry from the city’s own servers that obviously aren’t capable of handling many, many requests at once, they’re moving to third-party hosting that has the ability to handle demand,” Gower said.

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“Right now, they’re working on acquisition, testing, and deployment, and they’re nearing the finish line to launch this in the fall.”

Father Ariel Troster, a candidate for Somerset Borough Council in this fall’s municipal election, spent more than two hours trying to book a session for his daughter, even driving to the Plant Recreation Center in an unsuccessful attempt to register in person.

“I push update until 11 o’clock,” Troster said. “I finally got something, but not in the pool that was near us and not at a good time, but I got something. I’m tech savvy, I had multiple gadgets, I had the ability to get in a car and try it out in person at the community center; if it was hard for me, I can only imagine how hard it is for someone without that kind of time or energy.”

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He is concerned about the fairness of a system that favors those with the knowledge and resources to persevere.

“This is affecting the most vulnerable people the most. We had more options. But for people who are tied to their own neighborhoods, maybe they don’t have a car, they don’t have reliable internet, they don’t have a device, this makes this totally impossible for some people. And that’s really unfair.”

Capital District County. Shawn Menard said he, too, has been frustrated by the system that signs his children, ages 3 and 6, into the programs.

“I asked at the beginning of the term if this would be fixed and was told a solution to handle the influx was on the way,” Menard said in an email. “That was in 2019, 2020 and 2021. We know that this system is at the end of its useful life and the staff has said that this will be resolved in the next few months. We need to force them to do that.”

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Some frustrated parents poked fun at the old town system on social media, with one wondering if anyone in town had lost a bunch of computer punch cards (a reference to 1980s computer methods) and compared the process with calling a radio contest in a rotary. telephone.

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