We may have been overly exuberant as to the merits of the government's 1823 Call Centre. We recently heard from a reader who came away less than impressed after complaining to the call centre about undergrowth encroaching on to the pavement near a school, which was used by children from 5 to 11 years old.
After her initial complaint, she was told that "the whatever-government department" must first send an inspection team to the area to determine how much space was dominated by the undergrowth, and how much space was still available for pedestrians to use. Then another team had to decide who was the legitimate owner of that particular stretch of road. If it was private, "the whatever-department" would send a letter to persuade the owner to trim the undergrowth to make way for pedestrians. If the road belonged to the government, then they needed to find out whether it was the responsibility of the Highway Department, the Lands Department, or the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department.
She says the matter took an entire summer and countless emails before a team of four workers turned up one day and completed the job in two hours. The experience has not endeared her to the 1823 service.
Just so that you know we're on top of the social media scene, we can reveal that the average Twitter user is a young American woman with an iPhone and 208 followers. This information is gleaned from a recent survey of some 36 million Twitter profiles by Beevolve, a social media monitoring website.
Most Twitter users (53 per cent) are women, and 74 per cent of users are aged 15-25 years, 15 per cent are between 26 and 35 years old and 6 per cent are over 46. Most users are based in the US (51 per cent) followed by Britain with 17 per cent, Australia with 4 per cent, Brazil with 3.4 per cent, Canada with 3 per cent and India with 2.9 per cent. The majority (81 per cent) has less than 50 followers, 6 per cent have 50 to 100 followers, and 6 of every 100 users have no followers. Women send the most tweets, while 25 per cent of users have never tweeted. Fancy that.