Essentially, you need to be a hacker to register your kid for swimming lessons.

You wake up before the sun and marshal an arsenal of digital devices for a brute-force attack on the city’s system — parents I know talk without exaggeration about setting up two laptops, a desktop computer, two mobile phones, and a landline.

You have your seven-digit program codes ready, copied from the massive and barely comprehensible listings in the paper guidebooks. You have codes for several backup possibilities. You have your family number, and the individual numbers of each member.

Then, at the stroke of 7 a.m., you start maniacally dialing and redialing your phones and refreshing your computer screen, then entering codes as quickly as you can to secure a spot. There are busy signals. There are online rejections. A browser crash can spell heartbreak.

And then if you are lucky, your son or daughter will learn to swim. If you want to add a gymnastics class, you buckle down and continue the process, the odds of success getting longer as minutes pass. If you have more than one kid, you may require divine intervention.

The seasonal Festival of Frustration that is the community-recreation program registration period begins today: this morning at 7 a.m. in Etobicoke; Sunday morning in Scarborough; North York on Tuesday and finally the central district of the city on Wednesday.

If you listen closely over the next week, you’ll hear it, the mad howling swelling up from one corner of the city and spreading to the next, until it is like this whole town is united in hatred. Hatred of FUN. That formerly beloved concept, ruined by the city’s FUN GUIDE and godforsaken FUN ONLINE registration portal. That the city dares to call it that summons a different F-word to the lips.

It’s quite a feat the city performs here, taking one of Toronto’s greatest assets — the affordable programming for people of all ages at pools, rinks, and recreation centres — and turning it into a source of resentment and rage.

Can this familiar ritual happen in the middle of an election campaign without someone promising to fix it? Rob Ford, with his customer service mantra? Olivia Chow, with her focus on families? John Tory, with his vaunted private-sector experience?

But how could it be fixed? Where to start?

Mark J. Richardson, a father of two who runs an IT business, on Thursday tweeted a photo of his home “mission control,” featuring devices lined up ready for registration day. He’s been studying the issue and making proposals about it to city council for a few years.

His main preoccupation is with the underlying cause of the massive rush: the limited number of spots. This, he says, is because the cost to registrants is very low — he’s studied fees for recreation programs across Canada and says Toronto’s far, far lower than average. For many that’s a source of pride, but Richardson says those fees make the programs a burden on the budget, which prevents expanding them. “By subsidizing middle-class white folks like me downtown, the city is taking away potential spots from a single parent in Danzig,” he says.

He suggests the city could double or triple fees for most programs — they’d still be a deal compared to private-sector alternatives — and then target deep discounts and free passes at those in need. That would bring in more funding to expand the number of spots.

Of course, another way to expand the number of spots would be to just invest more tax dollars. But in a budget environment where fire stations are being closed and public housing units are allowed to crumble from lack of maintenance, making the case for investing in expanded moms-and-tots yoga classes is tough.

Even without expanded spots, maybe we could try a lottery system. Only slightly more luck would be involved than in the current redial-and-refresh marathon of hope, and a period of weeks to register for lottery spots would eliminate the early morning scramble of aggravation.

If nothing else, we could fix the website. If you go online to book a hotel, you type in what you’re looking for and it shows you the 20 or more available options closest to your criteria. If you go to the FUN ONLINE page you face a blank window asking you to “search by bar code.” If the program you try is full, you enter a different bar code. And so on.

“It is not a system designed for any kind of customer service,” says Richardson. He suggests that if the city can’t or won’t properly redesign the website, it could just do what the TTC did: let private citizens do it. The TTC released vehicle schedules and GPS tracking data through the city’s open-data initiative, and allowed private developers to create widely used apps that show you when the next bus or streetcar is coming to any stop in the city. It has worked like a charm.

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If recreation program data were released, developers could do the same, creating online tools that make booking a spot in a swim program as simple as those hotel-room websites. Who knows, maybe it could even live up to the name FUN.

Candidates, if you’re listening, there are tens of thousands of parents around the city right now whose votes might be won by your promise to come up with a better system. Just wait till afternoon to make your announcement. In the morning, we’ll all be busy hacking away at the system we have now.