As expected, a little public outrage got us some answers about those late night phone calls the other day. The company responsible, FirstCall, has taken responsibility for the screw up. Best of all, Lincoln won't be charged for any of the calls. That's the good news.
The bad news is that something is still wrong. FirstCall tells us they can make approximately 3,000 phone calls per minute. Yet we are also told that 90% of the 52,967 phone calls were made within 90 minutes. That's a rate of only 530 per minute -- a mere 1/6 the advertised rate. Why the discrepancy? Had the calls gone out at the advertised rate, they would have been done in about 20 minutes.
Something doesn't smell right. City officials need to take a look at our contract with FirstCall and compare what we were sold with what we've been given. If FirstCall isn't living up to its promises, perhaps we need to shop elsewhere.
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I’m guessing 3000 per minute is for FirstCall as a whole, not just the Lincoln market. There were a number of storms this weekend throughout the country, so it makes sense that all the lines aren’t dedicated to Lincoln.
If nothing else, they should open the competitive bidding and let SecondCall and ThirdCall have a chance to earn the business.
What I think is weird is that they keep saying that the calls that happened overnight were a result of unanswered calls and were call backs. We got an early morning call. We have an answering machine so if we had gotten a call in the previous afternoon it would have been “answered”. We did have any messages on our answering machine. Thus, we should not have been on the list for the early morning call in the first place. Hmmmmm.
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