Our city council is famously dysfunctional, so I was pleasantly surprised this week to get an immediate response to my concern about the power line attached to our house.
The power pole across the street has developed a lean that is pulling at the power line, which has actually bent the metal attachment thingy that connects it to our house. (This is one of those situations where a picture is worth a thousand words – especially if you don’t have the requisite vocabulary (or knowledge, let’s be honest) – but unfortunately I’m at work right now).
Embarrassingly enough, we’d all noticed the bent attachment a few weeks ago, when the architects, tilers, my husband and I were having another look at the miserable state of our tile cladding. (I mentioned the tiles some months ago. We thought we’d managed to avoid the phenomenal expense of replacing them all by cleverly arranging a tiler to just repair the broken tiles. Sadly this was just an impractical dream, and the huge outlay for retiling remains ahead of us.) It wasn’t until the gardener – a very practical fellow – mentioned the taut power line and the leaning power pole, and suggested that I mention it to the council, did the idea that it might be a risk occur to me.
I went onto the council web site, and it turns out reporting a risk is far easier than I would have expected. Rather than wait for hours on the phone, on hold to some faceless bureaucrat, you can simply fill out an online report. This was a painless procedure, apart from the awkward moment when the site wouldn’t accept the report because it thought I might not be human. It actually said: “There is a problem. You may be a robot.” This in spite of my very definitely clicking the ‘I’m not a robot’ box. I was indignant. After several goes, it accepted my assurances, and my report whizzed it’s way into the corridors of power. I got an email shortly afterwards saying that the matter would be attended to asap, which I took with a grain of salt, assuming it was an automated response. But no! That evening, in the dark of night, someone came to assess the situation. My husband shamefacedly told the council worker that it had probably been like that for some time, but he said it was still important to fix it, because in the next big storm, the power line might get tugged right out, and we’d be left without power. I was very impressed when my husband told me (I’d been at work). I guess this is what our rates pay for. Well done, council! Mind you, nothing has actually been done to fix the problem yet. But surely soon…