What a wonderful day! Shame to be in the office...

Uni last night threw some more financial language my way - straight line depreciation, activity based costing, fixed/current assets, current/deferred liabilities, all good stuff. Now I've just got to sit down and try to remember some of it and use it to effect!

Leafleting tonight deferred to the weekend - I'm looking forward to finishing this round, though before you know it, it'll be time to send out November's inTouch (presumably with Jack Frost for company, brrr!)

My two favourites: GT and CS

Taking a quick break from my lunchtime emails and plate of toast swimming in hot butter (mmm), I noticed GT's special feature on Cleansweep's "Sweeping Success" since taking on 250 local people out of work to help. This is undoubtedly great news - as I've said before, seeing investment (albeit "old" money already agreed to some time ago and marketed as "new") in essential front line services is something I hope everyone can get behind - but it doesn't address the problem of the culture of working to rule at the expense of actually keeping the borough clean and tidy. There are a number of constructive ways this can be addressed - performance related pay, customer feedback (ie us), or even just a gentle reminder from supervisors that even if you are unable to remove something (I'm thinking of the flytipping along the railway embankments along Troughton Road) then report it to somebody who can follow up with the landowners and get it sorted.

And on the subject of Greenwich Time, a check on the online edition provoked an idea. Greenwich Conservatives are committed to abolishing GT, thereby sparing everybody a regular dose of propaganda and saving local people £3 million a year, but until the day comes where we are able to realise this, could the Council show some commitment to sustainability and affordability by giving residents the opportunity to subscribe to the online version and stop receiving dead trees through their doors? All thoughts are welcome...

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?

If you go out in the carpark today, you're sure of a big surprise...

Cleansweep are about. I wonder if they'll clear up the shopping trolley and empty beer cans I've asked them to remove on no less than 6 occasions?

Finance for eejits... like me!

First evening of Managing Information Resources at uni... it's good how much new information I seem to be getting exposed to, as well as getting some clarity and development on the stuff I already knew. Our assignment's going to test our ability to analyse statistics - my first idea was to prove whether or not abolishing retirement ages significantly affects an organisation's costs - through sickness, pensions, life assurance, and so on. My hypothesis would say it probably won't. I'll see what work thinks to the idea! We had something of a crash course in budgets: the difference between fixed and variable costs, turnover v income, zero point and historic budgeting and the difference between budgets and forecasts. It's all fairly basic stuff (for now), but really useful.

Just returned from the supermarket - don't tell anyone, but shopping at 10pm is a beautiful experience. Everything's self service, all the shelves are filled and the streets are calm. Not even the rain put me off filling up (no queues) and making use of that rare thing in London, a free air hose. Probably ought to grab my tea and hit the sack - got another evening of leafleting tomorrow!

Service resumed.. but for how long?

Once again, there's been lots to say, and not much time to say it. I think I'll take the approach of posting little and often, then maybe I'll get more said and done! But I shan't make promises I can't easily keep..

Did some leafleting in Charlton last night - perhaps the last weekday of this year, given how dark and miserable it's getting! Had a few surprised faces at the window - no doubt wondering who's lurking around in their front garden on a windy autumn evening. Peninsula's leaflets are well on way to being delivered for this month - but there won't be much time for rest before the next one goes out!

Having an ongoing ding dong with the council over rubbish in the Park Row car park - it's really becoming a joke now. Will Cleansweep be moved to do their job? More on that later.

I've also just began my MA course at Greenwich uni. Two evenings a week (for 3 years! all being well), it's starting off with a year of leadership and management courses. It looks like it should be enjoyable, because whilst I don't always agree with most of the theories of business management, it is at least relatively new stuff that I can get my teeth into and hopefully be well motivated to complete my assignments (ahem).

Customer service, a la NHS

For all the talk in the last 2 or 3 years about the NHS being overrun by administrators and KPIs, it seems that however much the standard of care has improved under recent governments, even the apparently much enlarged bureaucracy can't seem to manage to provide decent patient service. And before I get proper started, no it's not the fault of doctors and nurses, it's probably down to a whole number of complex factors that I probably don't understand. I'm not wanting to judge, merely to observe.

To explain, a colleague at work explained that her (serious) complaint written to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital received a quick-fire acknowledgement that a reply could be expected in the next 25 weeks.

25 weeks. That's almost 6 months! Have they really got many complaints to deal with? Or are they just trying to lower the expectations of everybody so that if they manage to address the problem within, say, 8 weeks, people are more likely to be impressed? Sounds like the risk managers and loss mitigators need some lessons in customer service.

Perhaps I'm making a fuss in my ignorance - perhaps it is seen as a fair length of time to conduct a full investigation, suggest whether an apology is in order and act upon it. But if satisfaction isn't delivered, then how long would it take to escalate a complaint? I would imagine most people would be too fed up to bother 6 months down the road apart from the odd hero and the vexatatious litigants.