Haringey does it again
A genius bureaucratic answer from Haringey Council this week. Genius because it is superficially so reasonable yet, when you apply one tiny morsel of knowledge, impressively eccentric.
I have been chasing up why it had taken Haringey Council the best part of a year to fix a damaged road sign which I had reported. Part of the explanation was that I had wrongly reported the sign as an unlit one rather than a lit one, which meant it went into the wrong system. Sounds reasonable that if I make a mistake something may take longer.
However… as I pointed out the photo I had supplied of the damaged sign showed no lights on it at all!
So Haringey Council’s answer to me really was that by reporting it correctly I made them handle it wrongly, when in fact I should have reported it wrongly in order to get them to handle it correctly.
Genius, as I said.
Mark, I had a similar response to a report of a damaged street nameplate. I
was thanked for reporting a problem with an unlit sign. But let’s
give Haringey the benefit of the doubt and assume it was my fault
for choosing the wrong category. However I gave a description and sent
a photo as well. So they got there okay and fixed the problem. To use
the old fashioned term, belt and braces sometimes works.
But sometimes what’s needed is another very old-fashioned idea. Someone from Haringey’s “Sustainable Transport” needs to take a look. This link shows what happens when they don’t
bother. http://bit.ly/182k5KTInstead they sent a 101 Council No-Can-So email.
It doesn’t actually have the number 101 on it. But it gives one
or more of 101 reasons why the Haringey staff couldn’t and wouldn’t do what residents asked. In this case, to make a
zebra crossing safer.
A resident – Gordon T on the Harringay Online website – then did something obvious and commonsense. He went along, took a
look, and made his own assessment of the problem and how it might be
solved. (Apparently in Japanese this
is called “Genchi Genbutsu”.) Gordon T took
a few photos and sent them to the sustainable staff at
Haringey Council. Being a public spirited citizen he didn’t charge
for his time. It was after all, a very ordinary problem and had some very
ordinary solutions. Which would have cost even less if the
Sustainabillies had done their Genchi Genbutsu in the first place.