Keeping track of things

As the Democrats used to say, you need to keep the bastards honest. Every time you log a graffiti incident on the Energy Australia website, they should reply with an email giving you the job number for cleaning it up. Here's a sample:

A month ago, I started to wonder whether all my jobs were being logged properly, as I was noticing that some kiosks were cleaned up pretty quickly, whilst others never seemed to get done. I therefor started tracking everything I logged in a spreadsheet.

What I've found is that most of the incidents have been logged by Energy Australia within 5 days, and generally cleaned up about 2 weeks later. I haven't been back to every site to check whether they've been cleaned or not, but as I go past them from time to time, I have a look at how they are going.

Interestingly, I logged 5 incidents this week. I got two emails back yesterday - one for an incident logged on the 4th, and another logged last night. However, the three in the middle have gone walkabout. I really wonder whether their system is eating some of the incidents, or whether they are simply failing to log them.

If I don't get a response within a few weeks, I contact Energy Australia and follow up over the phone. I shouldn't need to be doing this, but unless I am absolutely certain that they are on top of things, I'm going to check and check and check again.

The good news is that the cleaning efforts of Energy Australia appear to be bearing fruit. When I first started doing this a year ago, all their substations and kiosks were a bloody disaster - coated in graffiti half an inch thick. Now, most of them are clean and green. Yes, graffiti does creep back, but in nothing like the quantities they used to attract, and the attacks are much less frequent.