Thread by @michaelbolton

1. As a U.S. citizen (I'm a Canadian citizen too), I'm obliged to provide the IRS with a Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts (FBAR) every year. So, I download the form. It's a PDF that I can fill in at the keyboard. I download the PDF apparently successfully.

2. When I open the PDF in Chrome, I see a single page. It says

"Please wait...

If this message is not eventually replaced by the proper contents of the document, your PDF viewer may not be able to display this type of document." OK. Failure One.

3. Further quoth the page: "You can upgrade to the latest version of Adobe Reader for Windows®, Mac, or Linux® by
visiting adobe.com/go/reader_down…." I click on this link. It returns a 404. Failure Two.

4. I poke around Adobe's site, and I find the place from which I can download Acrobat Reader DC, and I download and install it, including the Chrome extension. I press Ctrl-J in the browser to see my downloads, and attempt to load the file. Same problem as before. Failure Three.

5. No matter! Using my newly-downloaded desktop version of Acrobat, I open the downloaded FBAR file. It opens! I open an older FBAR to use as a reference, too. In the new file, I enter the first line of data, the filing name. On the third keystroke, Acrobat crashes. Failure Four.

6. This stuff never actually stops. We are swiftly moving towards Terry Gilliam's /Brazil/. And I believe it's in large part because people are doing their best to avoid making real, human, engaged, experiential contact with their own products and services.

7. It continues: I include (as is conventional) a space between the first three and last three characters of my Canadian postal code. Despite vast computing resources available, someone has determined that a space is an invalid character, and the software won't accept it.

8. To choose the province that I live in (instead of a state), I have to select the country first (that's two more fields below). In order to get there, though, I have to dismiss two error messages that rudely pop up to tell me that the fields I can't fill in yet are mandatory.