6 months on…

UPDATES in the comments section below.

…and a day, because I forgot to post this yesterday.

Remember this post, when I suggested that things are slowly but surely falling apart in the City of Cape Town. Well, here’s a good example – a pothole on a shared pavement/cycle path that I reported back on the 7th September last year.

(as long as you don’t expect a pothole filled in within 6 months) (and one day)

Looking at the email thread, I reported it to the appropriate city email address at 9:18am and received a reply:

Dear Sir
We hereby acknowledge receipt of your e-mail dated 07/09/2011
Please be advised that we have forwarded your concern to the relevant department for their action.

together with a case number, at 9:44am – a turnaround time of 26 minutes. Brilliant.

Sadly, in the intervening 263,520 minutes (yes, that took some rudimentary calculations on my part), precisely bugger all has been done about fixing said pothole.

During these minutes (each one of which I have paid my municipal rates for), I enquired why there had been no progress on the 26th September and was told:

All complaints are worked on a first come first to be served basis and on the availability of manpower and equipment. So we cannot determine or give out timeframes.

I reported the pothole again on 2nd November and got this:

Please be advised that we will follow up with the relevant department and will keep you informed of the outcome of this issue.

But they didn’t. And I had cause to report it again on 24th November after a little kid (not mine) fell off his bike having hit it.

Guess what?

Dear Sir/Madam
We hereby acknowledge receipt of your e-mail dated  2011/11/24.
Please be advised that we will follow up with the relevant department and will keep you informed of the outcome of this issue.

And guess what? They didn’t.

Yesterday marked 6 months of constant inactivity on the City’s part. If this pothole was an e-toll, millions would be vocal in support of me withholding my rates until it was scrapped. Or filled in. Whatever – you get the analogy.

I’m sure that someone will forward this to @HelenZille – even though this is a City issue and she doesn’t really have anything to do with the City. Sadly, no-one will forward it to our actual mayor, @PatriciadeLille, because we all know that that would be a complete waste of pixels.

City releases 2012 Load Shedding Schedules

…and inevitably causes widespread panic and discontent.

As is their wont, in fact, since Eskom is currently struggling with huge demand and very limited supply. This is probably down mainly to the ridiculous heatwave that has crossed the country and the increased use of air-conditioning – especially in office buildings and the like – as people return to work after the summer break.

Thus, a little bit of forethought before you needlessly waste power would be nice. Because we all know the alternative:

Emergency loadshedding is a controlled way of managing available electricity distribution capacity when an unscheduled power shortage occurs.

The electricity loadshedding schedules for 2012 are now available. The schedules are indicative and would only be utilised in the event of national load-shedding being required by Eskom.

Customers are asked to switch off any unnecessary appliances in order to minimise or avoid this event.

The full list of loadshedding schedules is available in PDF here. Alternatively, you can go to the City website here and select from a detailed but limited list of suburbs to get a detailed map of the different areas and times.

And I’ll just write this bit again, in bold:

The schedules are indicative and would only be utilised in the event of national load-shedding being required by Eskom.

Even though no-one will pay any attention to it.