After writing both here and on Interior Minister Aryeh Deri's Facebook wall about how inefficient the new appointment system is with it set up for the public to request appointments via email and to then wait for a call back, the system has been slightly altered.
I would like to think I had something to do with it, but it probably had nothing to do with me. At best I might have been one of tens of thousands of people who complained about the obvious problems....
I checked the website yesterday and discovered that instead of a list of email addresses as appeared before, the link to making an appointment now takes you to a page where you click on your city and then fill out a form to submit online requesting an appointment.
Still not perfect, as you submit the form and still have to wait for them to contact you, but it is better than the resident having to send an email on his own and not know if anybody actually sees it. At the end of the day, it is more or less pretty similar, but I think most people will be more confident with an online form than with an email that they had to get right on their own.
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I just did something better. I work all day in Tel Aviv, and for me if I have to go to the Beit Shemesh office, I may have to take some time off work at least, or the whole day at most if the appointment is in the middle of the day. So I sent an email to the Tel Aviv branch, and got an appointment there. I imagine people working in Jerusalem could do the same thing. My appointment was for 8:30 today. I arrived and was given a number but there were about 100 in front of me. I just about gave up, when I overheard one of the girls at the number machine give a number for a pre-assigned appointment, so I asked for a number, now there were only 10 in front of me, so with 15 minutes I was called, and within 10 minutes it was over, and I was off to work. Under the new system, you have to specify your city, so it would complicate matters, unless you explain in the actual mail that you want to go to the Jerusalem or Tel Aviv office.
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