Fair warning: I’m on a rant. I’ve been spending all my time living in the St. George Hunger
Games, also known as trying to get a COVID vaccine shot. There are 30,000 people in St. George
over the age of 70, and every single one of us has been trying to capture a slot online but it is
impossible because the appointments fill up in 30 seconds and then the site crashes. Honestly,
it is easier to get a ticket to the Temple Square Christmas Program and you all know how that
goes.


If you cannot work the buttons on the internet (and this is the case for many of us over 70),
they tell us to just call a phone number. I am going to give you the number and I challenge you
to call: 435-986-2549. Yep, I’m publishing that number right here and if you think they will
really answer I would like to sell you some fine land in Florida because that number is
perpetually busy. As a matter of fact, you should retire to Florida because St. George has
become too crowded, but I digress. The nice man at the Board of Health told me that the
problem was that they only had 5 people to answer the phones. The solution to this problem is
so obvious that I won’t even say it! I can quote the nice man at the Board of Health because I
physically went there and stood in line to try to figure out how to get an appointment and he
thought it would be a good idea for me to just call the number above. This is what you get
when the government runs something.


It’s not like we didn’t see all this coming. We all knew in March we were going to have a
pandemic. The pharmaceutical companies knew what was happening and they immediately
started working on vaccines. If we knew we had a pandemic, and we knew there was a vaccine
coming, maybe we should have started figuring out the delivery system sometime in June or
July, right? We would have been ready. Now, all of a sudden, our site crashes and we only have
5 people to answer the phones. Who could have possibly seen this coming?

I have some suggestions to fix this problem.


First, how about a software program that just accepts your information and puts you in a line?
Then, the computer system could simply send an email or call when it is your turn. I am
confident that there are lots of 12-year-olds who could write this computer program and
probably one of them is my grandson. I usually call him when I can’t get my TV to turn on and
I’m pretty sure he is available since I hear he doesn’t go to school anymore. All 30,000 of us
could just be in some virtual line and show up when it is our turn instead of spending hours
every day trying, unsuccessfully I might add, to capture one of those elusive appointments.
Second, why can’t we just farm this out to Amazon? Have you ever seen Amazon’s site crash?
No! Not even on Black Friday. If you want something from Amazon, you just clickity click their
website buttons and it appears the very next day. What a system! If Utah doesn’t have any
computer people as smart at the Amazon computer people, couldn’t we just give Jeff Bezos a
bunch of money and let Amazon make our appointments? The Amazon people should have
thought of this and offered. I think I’ll suggest it to them.

Third (and this is my best idea), why don’t we let the people at Chick-Fil-A run the whole Covid
shot business? They really know how to do this. Have you been to Chick-Fil-A lately? The hubby
and I go there about three times a week and no matter how long the line is we never wait more
than 10 minutes. Those Chick-Fil-A people really have this get in line and get your chicken thing
down. I think they could get us in line and get our shot thing just as fast.


I’m going to take a wild guess here and say that the government doesn’t want any of my good
ideas. Here’s the thing: old people just want this to work. We want our two shots, but you know
when everyone gets the first shot, we will just go through the same old nonsense trying to get
the second shot. We want to see our grandchildren. We want to go out to dinner and go to a
movie. We want to get on a plane and go on vacation. We are trying to be patient, but we are
old and there isn’t much shelf life left. That’s my rant.