Ich Haben Eine Kleine Problemo...

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When you go to the Smart City home page you will be greeted with the banner bar above. Are you looking for something? On the site? You know, like with a search? See the search icon? No, neither does anyone else. Because it doesn't exist. Now, you might think that little icon on the bottom right of the screen capture looks like a question mark for search. You'd be wrong.

Globe In Callout

This is actually an icon allowing you to change the language for the entire site! That's right. There is no search function but you can read whatever it is you can find in a multitude of languages. How so PC! And what a selection we have. Afrikaans, Belarusian, two dialects of Chinese, Haitian Creole, Igbo, Hindi, Latin (a dead language), Pashto, Serbian, Xhosa, and wait for it...Yiddish. Oy vey!

But there is a little problem.  See anything missing:

Somewhere between Dutch and Esperanto one might, assuming alphabetic order holds, expect to find "English." You're probably thinking this just cannot be so, that there must be an obvious answer. Perhaps the current language isn't shown. Perhaps English would magically appear if we went to say, Hebrew? Let's try.

If you're not up on your Hebrew, you're left with randomly selecting to get to familiar ground. Can you imagine how annoying this would be if you accidentally slipped and selected the wrong language? And...we still don't know if English magically appeared, though we suspect the newly selected language  is the one with the check mark.

Why don't we try to parlez vous francais?

Yep. The selected language is checked. And "English" is still nowhere to be found. And what is really interesting is that these technodweebs are using Google services to translate the page (thank goodness) but using Google's search seems to have eluded them.

How do governments get away with doing this kind of crap? In a word: relativism. In their world nothing is tied to an absolute. No functional requirement, no minimum performance. We in The Other Dunwoody Triple Dog, Lick The Frozen Flagpole Dare anyone with the city to provide a document, predating the deployment of this site, that requires this function listing the specific languages and excluding English. Extra credit for performance requirements. Ain't. Gonna. Happen. Because if there were such a document, then someone at city hall should be fired for giving the rollout order for this, or if this matches the requirements they should be fired for a really stupid specification.

More likely they're relying on relativism. This is "better." Better than what you ask? Well that is the other edge of their Sword O' Stupidity: incomplete comparisons. Better than whatever, it doesn't matter. And it is better because they say it is. When they get tired of "better" they'll use better than better: "best." Something that is "best" isn't necessarily better than anything or everything else, it is just that nothing else is better than best. So lots of things are "best."

Now we're at a point where we all can agree. The Dunwoody IT department is the best!