1300 HOUSING endangering residents?

Is 1300 HOUSING's lack of an emergency line endangering residents?

[This item has been revised due to a prescient if somewhat Hobbesian insight from a commentator (see below) who writes "... if an "Emergency" line was created, then you'd wait just as long on that as you do in the regular "Maintenance" line? An "Emergency" is the opinion of the caller...". "Anonymous" has a point. Accordingly, DH now offers this anecdote only as a footnote for the historians on the teething problems of 1300 HOUSING.

In a further development, DH hears that 1300 HOUSING's performance is improving with time, and congratulates HNSW]

DH has heard the following story from a neighbour. Now DH can't completely vouch for the common sense of the neighbour, but all the more reason to be worried...

The neighbour, lets call her Mrs X, claims she smelled gas leaking in her kitchen

Mrs X tried to get through to HNSW but the line was busy. Since there is no emergency option, a After hanging on for 20 minutes, Mrs X was unceremoniously cut off.

Mrs X next rang her commercial gas company, but they wanted her to fork out $85 which she did not have, so the gas company suggested she ring Housing to make an arrangement for payment... Meanwhile presumably the house was filling up with fumes...

Now panicking, Mrs X abandoned the house, and hopped on the next bus to Broadway office to sort it all out, a good 45 minute trip...

Pity the rest of us in the street if the house had blown up in the meantime!

Planet 1300 HOUSING

Planet Housing NSW breaks free of its earthbound moorings and into the realm of pure theory

Correction: Your local office can still be contacted if you ring their original number. You will then end up on the 1300 HOUSING line. Choose option 3. If you're lucky and the line is not busy, you may get through. Then again, you may wait up to 20 minutes and end up with the call centre anyway.

Well, it's finally happened!

Housing NSW has now disappeared behind the 1300 HOUSING smokescreen.

And despite 1300 Housing's proud KPI of "every call answered in 3 minutes", a claim always taken with a grain of salt, DH has been trying for an hour to get through.

1st, a 20 minute wait before cut off. Then 3 cutoffs in a row. "Please try again later"...

Oh, and there is now no emergency line, so bad luck if the kitchen is flooding

The only thing HNSW managed to get consistently right in its cash-strapped past was that emergency maintenance was done promptly and efficiently.

Now with the New Maintenance Program's $Millions and its brave new efficiency measures, all that appears to be gone down the gurgler

And on the phone line, there is no option to sort the "Emergency" sheep from the "General Maintenance" goats.

DH has always hypothesised that communications in and out of Broadway Office
disappear into the Broadway Arm of the Bermuda Triangle.

Now it seems that the office itself has been sucked up into the ether.

Why is DH trying to ring HNSW anyway?

About a year ago, DH noticed that the bathroom floor was rotting and had begun to subside. Finally with the new maintenance money, it was replaced. But the plumbers who disconnected everything have not been back to reconnect the water since the job was completed last Tuesday. Daily calls to the Spotless foreman yielded promises to call back which never happened. Now the foreman has been replaced, and she doesn't have the new guy's number. DH would like to know what's happening. And as a concerned citizen, she would like to know if anyone is monitoring Spotless' performance. There are ungenerous mutterings from tenants asking if HNSW has given Spotless a licence to print money.

Twitter: You can follow DH's attempts to get through to
1300 HOUSING on http://twitter.com/desperatehouso
Yeah, almost as boring as sitting next to a phone for an hour.

(This post is forward dated tho the events happened on the 6th)

DH bales out

As Mothership 1300 HOUSING prepares for take off to the furtherest regions of the galaxy, DH makes a desperate last minute decision to cut loose from the stratospheric heights of TP, bale out and rejoin her fellow earthlings.