Parents battle tech troubles in city’s swim lesson ‘Hunger Games’

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Two laptops, two iPads, two iPhones and some clever pre-planning are what it took for Rob and Grace Butler to register their infant daughter for fall swimming lessons with the City of Ottawa Monday night.

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The Butlers were among those who were able to capture a spot in what some refer to as the swim lesson “Hunger Games”, the regular competition for limited spaces in the city’s recreation programs.

“We were warned by our friends that this was going to be a problem and to basically just sit on the website,” Rob Butler said Tuesday.

Like many parents who tried logging in when registration opened at 9 pm Monday, the Butlers found the ottawa.ca website had crashed.

“The whole website was down with a denial of service, 503 error,” Butler said.

But the couple had a trick up their sleeves: a URL that bypassed the main landing page and took them directly to the course page. After about 15 minutes, they had their daughter registered.

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“Oh my God, it was like we won the lottery. We got in,” Butler said. “It’s hilarious — but it wasn’t hilarious at the time.”

Twitter was flooded with complaints Monday night and Tuesday from other parents frustrated by the process. But there is good news for the future, said Stittsville Coun. Glen Gower. Later this year, perhaps as early as November, the city expects to shift to a cloud-hosted system that can handle the web traffic demand the present set-up cannot.

Gower remembers the frustration himself from when his teenage daughters were young.

“You’d hit refresh, refresh, refresh seemingly forever until you finally got into the system. And people are still having to do that now,” he said.

“Rather than running the registration off the city’s own servers that are obviously not capable of handling many, many requests at a time, they’re moving into third-party hosting that has the capacity to manage the demand,” Gower said.

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“Right now they’re working on procurement and testing and implementation and they’re coming to the finish line to get this launched in the fall.”

Parent Ariel Troster, a candidate for Somerset Ward councilor in this fall’s municipal election, spent more than two hours trying to book a session for her daughter, even driving to Plant Recreation Center in an unsuccessful attempt to register in person.

“I hit refresh until 11 o’clock,” Troster said. “Ultimately I got something, but not at the pool that was close to us and not at a time that was good, but I did get something. I’m technologically savvy, I had multiple devices, I had the ability to hop in a car and try it in person at the community center — if it was difficult for me, I can only imagine how difficult it is for someone without that kind of time or energy.”

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She worries about the fairness of a system that favors those with the know-how and resources to persevere.

“This is hitting the most vulnerable people the hardest. We had more options. But for people who are bound to their own neighborhoods — maybe don’t have a car, don’t have reliable internet, don’t have a device — it makes this totally impossible for some people. And that’s really unfair.”

Capital Ward Coun. Shawn Menard said he’s also been frustrated by the system registering his children, ages 3 and 6, for programs.

“I inquired early on in the term about this being fixed and was told a solution was coming to handle the influx,” Menard said in an email. “That was in 2019, 2020 and 2021. We know that this system is at the end of life and staff have said this will be resolved in the coming months. We need to hold them to that.”

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Some frustrated parents mocked the city’s aged system on social media, one of them wondering if someone with the city had fumbled a pile of computer punch cards (a reference to 1980s computer methods) and likening the process to calling into a radio contest on a rotary phone.

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