DPW–All Over It, Kinda
Over the past six months or so, the city’s Department of Public Works has missed my recycling pickup five or six times. That’s not a disaster, just an inconvenience. Crap piles up outside my house, each time we finish a bottle of milk, I get a little more nervous, the dead-tree version of the newspaper starts to feel more like an indulgence than a necessity, and there’s some anxiety about whether the department will get it right the next time.
The lapse recurred this week. Tuesday is my recycling day, and nothing. My blue container was in the same spot at night that it was in the morning. So I left it out there on Wednesday; same result.
This morning I encountered a DPW agent in a pickup making his way down the street, and unloading the barrels of my neighbors, who’d experienced the same problem. I carted my bucket down to where he was working, and we tossed my recycling in the back of the pickup.
He explained that the driver was new and just missed the last half of the block. As I was walking away, he said, “I’m sorry about this, sir, and we’re working to make sure it doesn’t happen again.” Talk about turning a negative into a positive.
One Response to “DPW–All Over It, Kinda”
Leave a Reply
Recent Posts
- Postcards From Home: Film and Paper Archive (0
)
Medical Museum, 1993… - Biking to the Inauguration (0)
Yesterday, Loose Lips Daily linked to San Francisco Bike Blog-- which thinks the Washington Area Bi… - Will The Kerstetter Shooting Spark Reforms With D.C. Police? (0)
On the morning of November 6, two D.C. police officers responded to the home of David Kerstetter. Th… - 700 Block of 7th Street NW, November 28 (0)
… - Pearl Beale Gets Justice: City Gives Biggest Payout In Wrongful Death Of Inmate (0)
In a "Special 40th Anniversary Issue" of its newsletter, the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil…
- Postcards From Home: Film and Paper Archive (0
February 28th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
Mr. Wemple: Please consider digging into the fact that DPW collection teams have increasingly been seen doing their rounds on Saturdays, which is almost assuredly resulting in overtime/weekend pay. My neighborhood (off 14th Street) was graced with all those collection schedule change notices some time ago, and collection has been problematic ever since, and now I’m seeing some Saturday pickups. Clearly, something is wrong from a managerial standpoint at DPW. CP has an interesting potential story in the Saturday collections, which are probably costing taxpayers unnecessarily.