Whilst we were overseas our neighbour informed us that our small garage side door was open and that their had been break-ins in other properties in the our street.

luckily we have been using VoIP over Wi-Fi which means we can call Australia at no additional cost on my mobile provided we have a Wi-Fi connection. All the hotels which stayed in, had free Wi-Fi.

We are able to speak to the neighbours and find out exactly what happened. Apparently there have been other breakings in the street. We don't no if anything has stolen. Now on returning home we have found that nothing appears to be stollen

Whilst still overseas we thought we better report the break-in to Queensland police in case we need to put in a insurance claim.

We went to the Queensland police police link website which have an option to report break-ins. However after putting in preliminary information, it returned a message saying something to the effect that an IP address could not be accessed. We tried it multiple times. Frustration of putting in information and having to put it in multiple times, with it not working.

So we rang the 1300 number for reporting non-emergency situations to the Queensland police. The voice response system said welcome to the New South Wales police. We hung up and looked up the Browns plains police station number. Google said they were closed. So we went back to the 1300 number and let it give out it's multi minute speal, which included that they were having high call volumes. But to our amazement after the spiel, someone answered. After explaining the situation they gave us the direct number for the Queensland non-emergency number. We rang it. Apparently the 1300 number directs to the appropriate state depending on where you're calling from. It does not seem to have the ability to know that we were calling from overseas via Wifi. Something that whoever invented that system had not considered. Or perhaps it just cannot handle mobile numbers.

On ringing the Queensland number, not quite as long speal, but we had to wait a few minutes to get through. A very nice person asked us for the information we needed to file the police report. We mentioned that the website was not working and she said that they tell people to come out of the website and go back into it again, and then it will work. She also said she will email us the police report number.

On receiving the email we noticed that it had an incorrect date of for the incident.

We thought we would go back and alter the report via the website. How ever on attempting to do that, even though we had completely gone out of the website, it was still giving the same error message.

So we rang the Queensland non-emergency number, that the New South Wales person had given us, again, and got the incorrect date changed.

Overall about four hours of wasted time when we're on our overseas holiday.

All of which could have been avoided had the Queensland police website been operating correctly.

I sometimes wonder if such websites are deliberately not working to keep people in call centres, in jobs.