The last week of March I came home to find a paper shoved into my front door. Normally these papers are ads for local food joints, ads for local contractors, chemlawn coupons, or various other things. They are never important letters from the city. Letters telling you that they are putting temporary rubber water pipes in your yard and turning off your water from 8:30 am until 4:30 pm during the day to accommodate the work being done and also to accommodate the vast majority of the people in the neighborhood. Which I totally read as “Housewives & work at home folk be damned”, but hubby says that I read too much into things.
Let me just give you a visual of my driveway & treelawn right now.
On this letter it stated that if you had any problems with the rubber ramps-like driving over them-to please contact the city engineer’s office and they would try to make alternate arrangements. With each day that we have had to drive my hubby’s small gas sipping car over these rubber ramps I have become more and more fearful of my hubby’s under carriage as it doesn’t sound well at all when it hits those ramps.
So, I call. I reach the switchboard, although I have no idea its the switchboard, mostly because it was so quiet, and she was very polite. (note-I am not saying that switchboard operators are unpolite) I explain the situation and she struggles for words to say.
She finally tells me, “No one is here yet, they won’t be here until after 8. Why don’t you just call the independent contractor. I am sure you will get somewhere faster with them. If you get no where with the contractor, I guess I will put you through to the engineers.”
I took the phone number down, which by the way isn’t even in my area code. Instead of calling, I re-read the letter. They also provided an email address for the city engineer’s office. (At this point I would like to add that one of my very best friends from high school’s father is the head of our city engineering dept.)
I typed out a very nice email explaining the situation and my conversation with said switchboard operator. I wrote that if they would still like me to contact the contractor I would happily do so, but I didn’t want to do anything that they weren’t aware of.
Notice how it doesn’t say that I name dropped. I thought about it, but decided against it.
I kept checking my email to see if they got back to me. nothing.
About 30 min after I sent the email one of the city engineers was knocking at my front door. Along with apologizing, looking at my hubby’s car and the size of our rubber ramp, and apologizing some more with the promise that they would make the ramp more manageable for us by the end of the work day today, he told me that my friend’s father had said hello. He must have told me that 3 times. Then he handed me his business card and told me that if I had any other problems to please contact him directly on his personal line.
Not 5 minutes after he left, my friend’s father called. He wanted to make sure the situation was resolved to my liking and we caught up for a few moments.
I would like to think that this happens to everyone, that you don’t have to know ‘someone’ to get through the city’s bureaucratic red tape. But sadly, I am sure it isn’t. So I guess in this instance, I am happy to have known someone on the inside & I won’t be fearful for hubby’s bumper anymore.
On a side note-I will be Marching for Maddie in Sandusky, Ohio on May 9, 2009.
If you would like to join our team or you would like to donate I would be so happy!
Check out the widget in my sidebar. More details to come later.
