Useless 311 and Declining City Services

San Antonio has a new virtual 311 operator you must interact with (at least until it gives up).

I had such an interaction today.  It was pointless.  Finally I was connected to a real agent, who at least explained the situation and filed a new request.

My garbage was not picked up on Monday.  So I filed an online 311 request on Monday night.

Unbeknownst to me (in spite of my giving my contact info, the online service did not send me any emails) the request was closed on Tuesday morning.  Today (Thursday) it still wasn't picked up, so I went online to check it out.

I went back online and typed my service address.  That did nothing.  So I typed in the full service request number.  That was rejected with "not enough digits".  So I retyped, leaving off the full 8 character prefix to the service "number."  That worked, even though it was shorter than the rejected version and otherwise the same.

That's when I found out my service request was closed.  So I called 311.

So then the AI asks me for help, and I say something like this:

My trash was not picked up on Monday.  So I filed a 311 request on Monday night, and on Tuesday it was simply closed.  The trash is still not picked up.  What happened?  I need to get the trash picked up.

It could not understand that so I tried again, making it a bit shorter.

Still not understood.  So then it connected me to a live agent.

The live operator told me that the camera showed the trash had been picked up, so they closed the request.

What may have happened is that it didn't fall out.  The live operator said others had reported that.

Turns out, I had that exact same problem for 3 weeks with the blue recycling can.

3 weeks ago, nothing in the blue can was removed, so I loosened it a bit.

2 weeks ago, most but not all in the blue can was removed.  I added some more

Last week and this week, the bottom 1/3 of the can was not emptied.  That's better than nothing.

I've noticed recently that they squeeze the very heavy and thick city owned plastic cans so hard with the automated lifter that it nearly creases the can, trapping stuff in the bottom.  

Perhaps this started happening when they added an option for smaller cans.  So whatever the actual can size, it squeezes it down to the smaller size when lifting.