Today is the day that everyone scrambles to enroll their child in the Fall programs at Roswell Area Park.

And guess what? Their web site (www.roswellgov.com) is completely offline with the error:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80004005'
Could not connect to the server; Could not connect to remote socket.
/Default.asp, line 49

So my wife, and undoubtedly hundreds of others, are now racing in their cars to line up for those elusive bookings. I can only imagine the chaos over there this morning.

There is no excuse for this mess. Either insufficient resources have been assigned to the web site (and since we are an affluent fair-sized city, why would that be?) or the people in charge are incompetent.

Which is it?

I shall try and get an answer from Mayor Jere Wood and post his answers here.

This is not the first time there have been problems. I subscribed to RosWire a long time ago, and looked forward to the City news being sent to my Inbox. Then one day, that stopped and instead I get these hand-written emails with apologies from a staff member. Every single email says that RosWire will be working again "shortly" and if I look back I'll bet it's been over 6 months already.

If a commercial business ran their web sites this way, they would be bankrupt by now.

Update 8:50am: The web site came back online, 50 minutes after the registration began.

Update 9:30am: The Mayor's Assistant was kind enough to let me know that the Mayor was out of the office until Thursday, but that she has forwarded my email to "our Community Information office for a response in his absence"..

Update 4:22pm: Julie Brechbill, City of Roswell Community Information Manager, sent me a response posted here..