Claim for a missing tooth

Posted by lukecarr 3/28/2025

Claim for a missing tooth(tf230.matteason.co.uk)

358 points | 74 commentspage 2

noneeeed 3/31/2025|

I love how closely this matches how GDS built flows work, not just the visuals. The careful step by step pacing, the direct wording, it's all absolutely spot on.

Perfect.

matteason 3/31/2025|

Thank you! I design GOV.UK (and GOV.UK-adjacent) services at work so this was a bit of a busman's holiday

noneeeed 3/31/2025||

Aha, I did wonder. The language was just so spot on.

Keep up the excellent work.

TZubiri 3/30/2025||

Very creative and well executed.

When I was like 6 a friend choked me and I swallowed my tooth. I was very sad because the tooth fairy ("ratón perez") would not pay me :(

But thankfully I found a note notifying me that they found my tooth and reimbursing me :)

So I see where the idea came from, but I wouldn't ever had imagined this bureocratic twist

egypturnash 3/31/2025|

This note has horrifying implications. Did the tooth fairy go spelunking in your stomach and/or intestine? Are they sieving your sewer pipes for teeth just in case?

They must really want those teeth bad.

CoastalCoder 3/31/2025||

It's less nefarious than that.

Every tooth contains a government-installed tracker.

egypturnash 3/31/2025||

That's no more comforting to imagine. Possibly less so.

matteason 3/28/2025||

I made this, thanks for sharing it!

Backstory is here: https://bsky.app/profile/seamas.bsky.social/post/3lkigjm7sk2...

...and here: https://bsky.app/profile/matteason.me/post/3lknf6qfsek2p

tl;dr Séamas O'Reilly wrote a column in The Observer about faking a government reimbursement form for his son, who had swallowed a tooth and was worried about whether the Tooth Fairy would pay up if the tooth couldn't be put under his pillow. He published the form as a PDF (linked from the homepage) and I turned it into a digital service

Someone on Bluesky told me about our first successfully-fooled child yesterday: "I can confirm that form TF-230 worked flawlessly, and my cynical, streetwise 8-year-old son was utterly baffled by finding an envelope with his application form and a handful of coins in the letterbox this afternoon."

lukecarr 3/29/2025||

Awesome, great job on the site! I saw it on the Slack, and was surprised at the level of detail in some of the pages like the tooth selection screen :D

It also got a good chuckle from those I shared it with at work! :)

avs733 3/31/2025||

My hope, and the hope of the six other parent friends I just sent this to, is that this will still be up in a few years.

Made my and several friends evenings. Thanks.

Willingham 3/30/2025||

Absolutely love the work done here! Only change I would make is change "rubber" to "eraser" to help more English speaking children understand the content (:

LeoPanthera 3/30/2025||

Since it's a spoof of gov.uk, "rubber" is correct!

matteason 3/30/2025||

Oh god I knew this would be contentious

I've just changed it to 'eraser' but actually I should make it conditional on your navigator.language...

mbreese 3/31/2025||

I applaud your commitment to this bit. Thank you for making the world a nicer place.

rob_c 3/30/2025|||

Given the source of truth is British English, the maths says no.

cpfohl 3/30/2025|||

Ooh! Perfect opportunity to ask a question I’ve definitely not spent an inordinate amount of time wondering about without bothering to look for an answer!

Is maths in British English plural? Like, should that be “the maths say”?

matteason 3/30/2025|||

It's always "maths" not "math" but we'd always say "the maths says" and I've never questioned it until right now

timthorn 3/30/2025|||

It's still singular. Maths is just a contraction of mathematics, but without an apostrophe.

cpfohl 3/31/2025||||

Thanks! Now I have more questions, but they're better. This is good progress.

speerer 3/30/2025|||

Just like "the science says" (but unlike "the English say" ;) ).

chupasaurus 3/30/2025|||

Mathematics is uncountable (:

dullcrisp 3/31/2025||

And dense!

avs733 3/31/2025|||

Given the (highly memed) state of dental health in the UK it seems reasonable they would be responsible for this.

chupasaurus 3/30/2025|||

Even in Soviet textbooks for English in elementary schools (which are garbage by any standard) both variants were presented (:

chrisweekly 3/31/2025||

I have a TEFL certificate (Teacher of English as a Second Language) and I'm a native speaker and avid reader -- and this was the first time I ever encountered "rubber" as a synonym for "eraser". The benefit of the latter term is it's unambiguous and easily understood.

chupasaurus 3/31/2025||

I agree on eraser being superior.

I have an even weirder example from Russian language: file, folder and pocket are 3 out of dozen different words being used to describe a plastic envelope for documents in various regions and people don't understand each other. I remember only one more.

harripa 3/31/2025||

As has already been pointed rubber is common British English, but perhaps more interestingly the etymology of name of the substance comes from this usage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eraser#History

rcambrj 3/30/2025||

This is remarkably adorable :)

Check the tooth colours in dark mode though, "white" is very much not white (it's black).

matteason 3/30/2025|

Ah how have you set dark mode? I haven't got a dark theme via prefers-color-scheme or anything so whatever is setting it might just be brute-forcing white to black or something. I'll fix it if I can!

notpushkin 3/31/2025||

I suppose they’re using https://darkreader.org/ or something like that!

If you implement dark mode yourself, you can add `<meta name="darkreader-lock" />` to prevent Dark Reader from triggering.

theginger 3/30/2025||

How timely is this. Just minutes ago my child handed me a tooth to go under their pillow, then I find this.

p3rls 3/31/2025||

It's nice to see people treating real websites as something beyond SEO farms for users

NooneAtAll3 3/31/2025||

okay, I got fooled (by the coat of arms, primarily)

I truly thought UK gov did a joke to support children...

sam_goody 3/31/2025||

One day short of April's fools!

Or is it a timezone thing (The sun doesn't set over English empire, so no point waiting for tomorrow)?

Or, is this a real Government website and I am just being cynical?

abalaji 3/30/2025|

Gotta start 'em young on dealing with government bureaucracy.

blatantly 3/31/2025|

If it doesn't cost $200 of your time to claim $12, what is government for?

More comments...