Last week I spent six hours shopping for Obamacare on New York State's health care marketplace website. Officials had estimated that it would take the average person seven minutes. Either because I am not an average person or because the Obamacare people are idiots, I spent six hours setting up an account. You can't log in without an account.
There were many questions. The site ran painfully slowly. But I slogged through. Until I ran into a wall. This happened when the system tried to "verify my identity" by asking me to answer a set of multiple-choice questions generated by the DMV (which model car, if any, had I recently purchased?) and some credit reporting agency (which type of loan, if any, was mine?). The page froze. Apple's little blue circle spun and spun. I wound up with a cryptic error message written by some Indian coder.
So I gave up. But then, over the weekend, President Obama spoke soothing words. "What's happened is the website got overwhelmed by the volume," Obama said, calmly.