I've just managed to get a medical practice to send a correctly completed medical certificate of death to the medical examiner's office. I had to go there and wave government advice to ''Never use abbreviations or symbols'' at them. No, you can't write COPD as a contributory factor because it might mean Chronically Obtuse Practice Deficiency, and can I get my mother's death registered please? A 24 to 48 hour procedure has taken 13 days, many hours of my time and might have given me a traffic fine because Google maps tried to make me turn into a no entry street and left me in a bus lane.