Is it just me or is this country getting more ridiculous by the day??

I hate bringing up old stories, but in a country with a competent government we surely wouldn’t be making the same mistakes more than once, would we??? You just have to look at the new learner driver laws that were introduced last year and how the government had to make a U-Turn because of a stupid decision. You could say the exact same thing about the budget.

The latest announcement that from the 1st of May 2009, anyone driving a car without a NCT cert will automatically be given a court summons and on conviction could receive 5 penalty points. They announced this on the 14th of April 2009.

Now, my car is due for a NCT test this month. Two years ago, in my local NCT centre, there was a waiting list of 2 months to be tested… Only the other day I spoke to someone else that was waiting over 3 months to get a test date.

Today, I went to book my test online at www.ncts.ie – How Irish is this, not only is the site not functioning, but it also has a rather ridiculous message:

Due to the recent announcement, NCTS are currently experiencing an unprecedented demand in the number of people requesting a booking. Please be aware that our Call Centre is fully operational however, you may experience problems getting through to us and this is purely down to the volume of people trying to contact us, we do ask that you bear with us on this and that you keep trying.

For booking information please phone 1890 412 413 or e-mail us on bookings@ncts.ie

NCTS do endeavour to contact as many car owners as possible and from the 1st January this year we have sent over 247,000 notifications regarding their NCT however, it should be noted that in some instances such as, change of ownership of the vehicle, if the vehicle is off the road or if the vehicle is out of tax that can affect whether a letter is issued for that vehicle.  Therefore, we would encourage customers who have not heard from the NCT but feel their car is eligible for the NCT to contact us directly and we will arrange an NCT for them.

I tried calling the number they give on the website, after 30 mins of trying, I can’t get through.

Nevermind the fact that I never once received a notification that my car was due for a test, which I think should be the responsiblity of the body to remind us, I’ve got two weeks to book a test when the site is down and no-one is answering the calls.

So it’s up to me to spend 2 weeks now on the phone waiting and hoping that I get through and be able to book a suitable slot to be tested.

Incompetence isn’t the word for this. How can a body that is in charge of keeping our roads safe, dish out new penalty points when they don’t even ask the NCTS if they can handle what was obviously going to be an upsurge in bookings. Have they not even seen the newspapers for the last few months where people aren’t buying new cars anymore, did they not stop to think that there will be more people than ever looking to get their cars NCT’d?????

Tags: Car Testing, National Car Test, NCT