Thursday, March 5, 2009

Bother the BBC!

What is it that makes people want to tinker with something that works perfectly well? Surely in this economic climate it can't be a question of too much money, or spare time?
I wondered this the other day when I opened up the BBC Weather website to find that it had been redesigned. Instead of giving me an instant snapshot of what the next five days were going to bring (tailored to my London postcode), it gave me an instant snapshot of what the weather was going to be during the night (I'd logged on at 7.30pm, wanting to know what the next day's weather was going to be like.)
To see the next four days, I had to scroll down, which meant that the page had to rebuild, which took about five minutes. To get a local forecast (as opposed to a national one), I had to choose between London Bridge, or one of the London airports. As anyone who has been to London by plane knows, none of these are remotely near London, apart from London City Airport which is 10 miles from where I live. 
I must apologise to non-UK readers for being so parochial (not to mention grumpy). But there's a universal issue here. Hasn't anyone at the BBC ever heard the phrase "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"?
If anyone wants to join my puny protest against corporate idiocy, I've set up a Facebook group here