My civil service heroes are our Dept of Environmental Health guys.
Their department is usually only known for routine garbage collection. And that alone is damn important for a functional and nice society. When they have a couple trucks down for maintenance at the same time the regular pickups fall behind and we get a bit anxious and nauseous as the curbside garbage bakes in the tropical heat. And we are so happy to see when they get back on schedule.
But when we have to call them from the 9-1-1 centre it is for some horror of a biohazard. No matter how terrible the situation they just tell us not to worry and they will gather a crew and take care of it.
The GIS website I created and maintain gets 16,000 hits a day. I suspect it answers a lot of questions. When it can’t answer the question, there is a direct email link to my (and my two co-workers). It’s kinda fun to send an immediate response. People are often shocked. So many ‘Contact Us’ links on web sites just seem to be shot off into space. Not ours.
Spain’s employment offices network has a reputation as not being good either as a place to find jobs or a place to find employees, but I swear it’s due more to misuse and lack of faith than to the system itself; those times I got a hook through them were all misuses, which blows, but they’re often used honestly by companies looking for employees with low qualifications. They are even in contact with the embassies to help wannabe immigrants or relatives of returnees* find legal, honest, all-papers-clear jobs; I know the Italians do it as well.
A very common path to immigrate from Latin America to Spain or Italy is to claim back your grandparent’s nationality, which your own parent hadn’t bothered to keep. So you have families coming with one “returned” national who’d never been in the country before and everybody else as “spouse/child of national”.
I don’t work for the state, but work for an organization that does work directly with state employees. Yes, there are some who never reply to emails and can’t be counted on to do the very basic (but that’s in any industry), however, the majority I’ve encountered, work with, and call my friends are knowledgeable, hard-working and are excited (for the most part) about the work they do and contribute to the residents in my state.
Another DOT worker here to say thanks for the appreciation. So often all we hear is people complaining, but really we are just trying to get you where you’re going safely.
Actually, I’ve had pretty good luck with people at government agencies getting back to me with alacrity. One time I had emailed a guy at the appropriate agency about how to deal with clothes moths. Another time I wrote to a small community’s building permits office trying to find out about a delay in the re-opening of my favorite amenity. But those were both agencies that probably got very little traffic.
enipla, it sounds like your feat is just wonderful. It’s so frustrating being at one of those government websites where it seems as though all the hyperlinks are circular and get you nowhere.