And then I wrote...
by Dick Schilling, "Editor Emeritus"
... that almost everyone has a story to tell about trying to get through the “menu” of telephone options robotically provided when trying to contact a utility or big business.
I had noticed that the streetlight on my corner was out on a Friday night. I figured it would be pointless to report that over the weekend. I was hoping that someone would call Alliant and so waited through Monday to see if it would be taken care of. When it wasn’t, I called Tuesday, and after a few menu choices, was put in touch with a human. That person switched me to a different department after listening to the problem, and so I got to talk to a second human. She took down the information and noted that depending on workload, it could take as much as a week before they would get to it. Both humans were very respectful and professional.
It was only a few hours later that I noticed the guy in the boom truck working on the light, and the replacement fixture was entirely different in appearance.
Wow, I thought, there’s a corporation that really responds.
That evening, I heard on a news show that Alliant was asking to raise my costs by 10 to 12%!
That evening, I was amazed to notice that the new fixture provides a brighter, whiter light.
Maybe we get what we pay for.
A few articles in this newspaper recently caught my eye.
One was a proposal to get serious about developing a bee-butterfly plot in that flood protection area east of Iowa 76 in the northwest section of the city. As I have said here before, that sounds like the familiar “no brainer” when considering the alternative.
The second was the idea of converting the Luster Heights prison camp, which the state seems hell-bent on closing, into a facility for mental health care. In the first place, it seems short-sighted to close the camp to its present use, if rehabilitation is indeed a goal when it comes to minimum care prisoners. The same things that make the camp attractive for that purpose, its location and its remoteness from large population areas, might be helpful to those with mental health problems.
Finally, I noticed a passing reference to a new contract with the city’s waste collection contractor which apparently would cut recyclable collections to only every other week. That would seem to be counter-productive if recycling is a goal. Wouldn’t it be tempting to put recyclables into the regular container bound for a landfill? My single person household results in enough stuff to put out the bin every week. Families certainly must have more.
And recycling ought to be the goal.
