Donating blood, or not

The Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service claim to rather like my blood. However, for all the fuss they make about wanting more of it, I can't help but wonder: if that were true, surely they would make it easier to donate, offer more slots, etc.? When I lived in Scotland, I found it enough of a pain to find any donation sites that offered easy car parking. As I plan to visit soon, and they did SMS me again, I thought I should check what's available in coming weeks.

Their appointment search sucks. It's not the most intuitive and, crucially, I don't think it's helping to find anything at other locations and dates, even though I am flexible about both. In a bit of searching, in Perth I can find only one slot, at a time I can't make. In Dundee I can't find any, even if I try searching at a location where a different part of their website says they are open that day. Unfortunately, I have never seen a no-appointment donation session that did not have an enormous queue, definitely a problem mid-workday. No matter, I figure that if they needed my blood anywhere near as much as they say, they'd have their act together better for letting me donate any.

Paranoid postal people

So that I could validate my home address with the USPS, they generated me a shared secret with seven letters and thirteen digits. Even if everybody in the world were to try a guess at this secret on every second of their lives, it would remain extremely unlikely that anybody would discover it. Either the USPS has a most alarming threat model for the impersonation of residents, or they love an excuse to make people type random nonsense carefully. Perhaps nobody told them about rate limiting of attempts.