4 phone calls, 3 call centre operatives, 2 polite "asks" on the street, 1 manager, 1 meeting and 10 weeks later: Cleansweep Remove a Shopping Trolley

Today the saga of the dumped shopping trolley came to an end. I can't remember exactly when I first noticed somebody had parked up a trolley in the shrubbery of the Park Row carpark, but I know it was warm and sunny. The pictures I took at about the time I called the council contact centre up the first time were taken on 30 July.

To cut a long story short, the second time I followed up with the contact centre and they told me the job had been marked complete, I thought it might be a misunderstanding of the location. The third time I followed up with them I must have sounded sufficiently vexed for them to put me through to a manager at the Council, who to his credit did his best to move things along (and got the brushwood in the top two photos cleared up the next afternoon) but admitted to me that Cleansweep didn't really care about keeping the streets of Greenwich clean, as long as they completed their job detail.

I asked one of the Cleansweep guys in the street if they wouldn't mind going 10 yards down the road. "No problem mate". I thanked him very much. Next day? Nothing done. A second call to the manager got me a face to face meeting - and who should have happened to be in the area leaning on their brooms? (at least until they spotted the manager) A second "ask" managed to move some dumped refuse sacks.

A fortnight later, the nights are drawing in and I notice this afternoon that it's finally gone. The beer cans and deadwood's still there, but if it takes the best part of the summer to move a shopping trolley, I think I'll put my faith in the forces of nature to rust and rot them away before Cleansweep do anything with them.

On a less sarcastic note, I've learnt a few lessons from this. I'll pick who I contact at the council carefully, and keep calling until the job's done. It's frustrating, but I imagine this sort of thing is a regular experience for the residents of the Borough: you need to be a real pain in the backside to get anything done. It's absurd.

When I temped at a housing association, every job undertaken by the maintenence crews was the subject of customer feedback by tenants and local residents - the association could monitor the performance of the crews by matching the job number to the feedback and take appropriate actions if problems recurred. It required cards, an excel spreadsheet and an administrator to operate - not a tricky system to organise. When will we as residents be allowed to give our feedback to the Council?