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Tuesday, September 14, 2010

«City of Boise Survey»

So yesterday I got this letter in the mail from the Office of the Mayor. They want each household's opinion on how safe they feel they are, how the city is spending tax dollars, and how they perceive Boise as a place to life. It's an online survey. They ask that the adult in the household who has had the most recent birthday take the survey. That would be me.

So they sent out a letter, they obviously want people to take the survey. The best way to get someone to do something is to make it simple. Right off the bat they hit you with a rather long URL that you have to type in by hand. After mistyping it once, I get there and I get this:

We are experiencing technical difficulties. This survey will be back online later this afternoon. If you would like to be notified when it is back online, you can send an email request to [address removed]

Do note, this was about 9:00 PM that I tried this. Exactly when does "this afternoon" refer to? Remind me again, do they really want people to do this servery? Or did they just feel like wasting envelopes and paper?

I planed to answer fairly well on the survey. I'm quite happy with Boise as a whole. I love the Greenbelt (a bicycle path that runs along the river). They seem to maintain it well; there's construction on the Greenbelt now, and they are building a new bridge in another section. The parks are numerous and well maintained. Road construction doesn't take forever... Maybe I've just got a skewed perspective because I come from the craptacular town of Ketchikan, where everything is half-ass patched and takes forever to be completed.

In fact, I'd say the survey website is about the worst thing about Boise so far. They made a point in the letter to make it clear the survey is hosted by ORC, an external and independent website. So the only fault of Boise is contracting their survey out to the wrong company!

EDIT: Just want to say the survey is working today.

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