DAE spend 2 weeks chasing a city permit problem that turned out to be one wrong drop down box?
So I was trying to get a food truck permit for a spot near the riverfront in Cincinnati and the online portal kept rejecting my application with a vague error code. I spent 12 days calling the permit office, driving down there twice, and even paid a guy $50 to look at my paperwork because I was sure I messed up the insurance forms. Turns out the whole problem was that I picked 'Mobile Vendor - Annual' instead of 'Mobile Vendor - Temporary' in a drop down box on page 4 that I never even noticed. The permit clerk finally showed me on her screen in about 30 seconds and I felt like a total idiot standing there in that lobby. The real slap in the face is that the temporary permit only costs $75 while the one I kept applying for was $340, so I was fighting myself the whole time. Has anyone else dealt with a city portal that hides the right option behind weird wording like that?
This kind of thing is everywhere once you start noticing it. My gym's app has two buttons, "Freeze Membership" and "Pause Membership," and they do totally different things, one costs money and one doesn't. The bank site I use has "Transfer" and "Move Money" sitting right next to each other and good luck guessing which one you need. It's like everything is built by people who already know the answer and forgot what it's like for the rest of us. Twelve days of phone calls for one drop down box is brutal, but you are far from the first person that lobby has seen.