The Sweet Service Award goes to the City of Cape Town and its Street Light head Faville Wenn, who made it his business to get the street lights in a section of Upper Fresnaye to work again, after regular outages over a period of almost two months. I reported the problem, which occurred two to three times a week, to the City of Cape Town and our Councillor Jacques Weber via Twitter, and was astounded that the Councillor implied on Twitter that I was lying about the street light outages. I copied him into each of my 20 tweets over the two months, and when I included Mayor Patricia de Lille he became really angry, and expressed this on his Facebook page, telling me to get her to fix the problem! The transparency of the Councillor’s disinterest is evident when he unfollowed our Twitter account, clearly embarrassed to see the Tweets of their non-performance! I sent text messages, as I had been advised, to the City of Cape Town, reporting each outage, but I did not receive a reference number for each of the complaints. Not once did anyone contact me or explain to Fresnaye residents what the reason for the outages were. Reaching my limit of patience after four nights without street lights, after receiving no response from the Sea Point, Fresnaye, Bantry Bay Ratepayers Association via their Facebook page, I called the City of Cape Town. Initially the Call Centre told me that there is no Street Light department, and that I should speak to the Electricity department, but they are not responsible for Street lights, I was told. A magic lady knew who I should speak to, and gave me the number for Mr Wenn, who told me that he was aware of the complaints, and apologized for not having contacted the complainants in Fresnaye. He explained that since the pavements have been destroyed in Fresnaye to lay the new fire optic cables, the Street light cables have been damaged. On the day I spoke to him, he provided his cell number and I promised to keep him informed of the street light situation. When the lights did not work in our immediate vicinity that night, I texted him a message about it. Unbelievably a City of Cape Town truck arrived 45 minutes later, and the street lights were switched on, only to last for two hours!! But since the day after, the lights have worked perfectly! Our Councillor can take a leaf out of Mr Wenn’s book in customer responsive and care.
The Sour Service Award goes to Pick ‘n Pay, and its Logistics operation, for parking a massive truck in a loading zone on Victoria Road in Camps Bay in contravention of the rule that all trucks delivering to the retailer should deliver from the back entrance of the store, and the traffic law that any vehicles parking should park facing in the right direction, and not in the opposite one! The truck also parked on a red line, blocking all left turn traffic at this intersection! It took some time for a representative of the outsourced logistics company to call, telling me that they used an outsourced driver for the day!
