Ask HN: Fellow Québec residents, what the hell is going on with the SAAQ?
It appears that our provincial government's equivalent of the DMV has gone completely off the rails.
Apparently they've gone through a "digital transformation" to consolidate and modernize 40-year old IT systems. And the absolute genius project managers running it decided to do things like shut-down services for a whole month and migrate everything at once.
It has gone about as well as you can imagine. Dealerships aren't able to properly register vehicles they've sold. Physical locations have queues with wait times as long as 5-6 hours. Payments made through online banking to renew licences have not been processed. Apparently the recommendation is to keep driving with your expired licence and carry a printed off bank statement showing that you paid. But good luck if you're pulled over, you might still get the fine anyways.
I just can't even comprehension this level of technological backwards-ness and insanity! An all-at-once deployment and losing track of bank transactions? In the 2020s?! How is this even possible?
Sorry. /rant