Another example of well-functioning goverment

Often when spring comes, many of the pipes on sidewalks for water-shut-off start rising up, providing an annoyance to runners and walkers.

At 8:49 this morning I sent the following message through the Duluth water and gas service website.

Spring has sprung, the ground heaves, and the water-turn-off pipes rise to trip the unwary walker.
Please add my address to your long list of tasks.

At 14:20 I sent the following message.

Thanks for the fast service on tamping down the water-shut-off pipe.  Another fine example of good government service.

If we really stop to think about it, there is a long list of government services at all levels that are provided efficiently and courtesy: Post Office, fire departments, Social Security, snowplowing, parks, and on and on.

I think the government bashing is mostly from those who don't want to pay taxes for any of the many services they receive.  They would rather provide these services themselves and make a profit from them.  How well, does the private sector perform?  Just consider all the problems you have with the device that you are using to read this.  How many help desks have provided prompt and correct answers?  Yes, you can find many corporations that provide quality products and services, but it often depends on management.  Good management is found in the public and private sectors.  Bad management is found in the public and private sectors.

Who decides radical design change?

After the dust for "Seamless" settled, I went to the Star Tribune web edition, expecting to see the usual facsimile edition.  Instead I found a clutter with a page occupying less of the screen than before.

Why do management and designers make radical changes that maybe only a few want?  Many users like the way things work and only want tweaks to fix a few things that don't work well.

Apple is notorious for this.  What worked one way well suddenly works in a completely different way.   Way back in the first decade of the Mac, I looked forward to updates, especially new levels.  Now, I won't touch a new level unless I buy a new gadget.  And many times, I wish I had stuck with the old gadget even if the newer is faster and has more data capacity.

I think the problem is "focus groups".  Management pays a few selected participants to attend a meeting while management watches behind one-way glass.  The moderator works and works to get the participants to agree to management's proposal.  Only when the participants agree to management's proposal do they get their honorarium and get to go home.

I know!  I was in a focus group to approve "Comfort Systems" for the Duluth gas and water department.  Few of us were happy with "Comfort Systems".  We didn't know until later who the entity was; we assumed it was a private utility.

Back to technology: "New and Exciting" may mean "Frustrating and Buggy".

To add insult to injury, Google won't let me scroll the text I pasted here.  It moves the window as a block instead of the text in the frame.  It didn't do that for the last post!!!

Efficiency (or inefficiency) - generalizations do not apply

This morning I called Consumer Cellular about replacing the landline at our cabin with a Wireless Home Phone Base.  Ezekiel answered before the automated message was done.  He took time to listen and he provided full information to all my questions.

Last week I called the local Sears store to check if they had the Phone Base in stock.  First, I got an automatic response about the purpose of my call.  Eventually I was asked what department I wanted.  I finally got a person; but that person was not in the store, he was who knows how far away.  He didn't think it was available, but before he checked, he wanted my first and last name!  What does my name have to do with my request for information?  I said this is taking too long and hung up.  Once upon a time, one got a store operator who pleasantly asked (generally) some variant of "How may I direct your call?"  She transferred you to that department, and if a clerk was not serving other customers, answered the phone and gave a simple yes, no, or "I'll check" answer.

This morning I also called Gopher State One Call http://www.gopherstateonecall.org, a non-profit that dispatches utilities to locate underground pipes and cables before an excavation.  We want to plant a tree close to a buried gas line.  I had to wait for several minutes to talk to Gabe, but he was thorough and friendly about getting all the information that he needed to dispatch someone.  He said it should be done within 48 hours.

This afternoon I looked out the front door and noticed a yellow line and a small yellow flag in our front yard.  Comfort Systems, our water and gas utility, had already marked the location of the buried pipe.  Comfort Systems is part of the City of Duluth's Public Works and Utilities Department.

On the other hand, after many weeks and many calls, our internet connection with CenturyLink is now stable and staying above 75% of the "up to 7Mbps" speed.  One of the round and round discussions I had was about getting a new modem.  We still are using our eight-year-old or so modem.  It seems something was done in our area that none of the customer service people were made privy to.  The customer service was all over the map as far as ability goes.  See "Round robin service robbin' my time".

I'm still waiting for a local store to respond to a question I emailed them a couple weeks ago.

Again, it is not the financial form of an organization, for-profit corporation, non-profit corporation, or government agency, that determines the level of customer service; it is the people and leadership of an organization that determines these.  If customer service is an organization's priority, revenue will follow.  If the bottom-line is an organization's priority, customer service will suffer.  Unfortunately, in the latter case, there are often not enough choices for customers to easily switch to another organization.