Renewed yesterday (Sunday) after 5 hours queueing at the Somerset West office. That's 5 hours free for considering the basic online system design that should replace that mind-numbing process (contact me at 0800-tendaz).
They said one of their 2 eye test machines had been stolen in a break-in, so there was just the one machine (regardless of whether you had done your test at an optometrist, which I had). They took on average about 45 minutes per person, although this was interspersed with some general fannying about, then somebody headed out and came back with several large bags of KFC. After that it slowed down more, and they implemented an informal 'cut-off', which meant that people who started queuing after 9:30 were told to go home or to Gordons Bay.
Altogether, nice enough staff and very courteous (especially with bringing some older people to the front) but the whole system is blindingly inefficient. No wonder there's backlogs.
