Dunedin: My job at the DCC

I started working at the Dunedin City Council on Thursday 21st of September.

I thought I would share my somewhat daily routine seeing as I never talk about work ordinarily.

I start work at 8:30am. I have the option of taking the bus in, however I choose not to. Its only a half hour walk to the Civic Center, which is directly at the city center, otherwise known as The Octagon.

I take the stairs up to the 3rd floor, using a fob key which is attached to my key ring. It gives me access to parts of the building.

I have a desk which is on an end, furthest from the window, quite near all the departments pigeon-holes. More about that in a sec. I have a desk which was literally raised to my working height for Health and Safety reasons.
On my desk are two widescreen monitors, which I work off of both. I also have my own telephone and inbox, with date stamp, 'Not Negotiable' stamp, stapler, pot of pens, posties and sellotape roll. I even have a riser for paperwork.

 

I have to wear work causal clothes, including black work shoes and smart black trousers. For some reason you can wear what you like on Fridays. I walk to work with my trainers and change my shoes when I get in first thing in the morning.

The church bells chime every 15 minutes, and a lot of colleagues use it by work practices. So when the bell chimes, I have to use one of the 3 lifts to go down to the Lower Basement to pick up today's mail. This is the mail for every department, including the library building opposite.

The Lower Basement is used as the mail in and out delivery space, so naturally this is where the vans come in and park. It is underground and also has access for the library mail depo. I check all parcels to see whether anything needs to be placed at the library dock, before I make my way up to the 3rd floor again with a huge trolley basket load of mail. We recently had a change of practice as the mail is becoming heavier and more frequent, so now two of us go down to collect the mail.

Back at the 3rd floor, we sort through today's mail. 'We' as in at least two of us. The mail is actually really disorganised. Some people that work here will label their incoming letters as just their name with the DCC building address. No joke. They have no idea how frustrating it is for us to have to use the 'names bible' just to see which pigeonhole to use. Some departments don't even use their updated pigeonhole name. Such as what may be labeled as 'Regulatory' really needs to go to 'Building Control'; or what are labelled as 'City Property' on the package needs to go to just 'Property', not 'City Development'. My manager seems to think its fine having the system be as it is. I did talk to her about it but apparently its like asking to get blood from a stone with some people/departments.

The mail is opened by a special machine that slices away the bottom of envelopes. After that we all take a bunch and process them. What we do is date stamp everything, and sort where mail needs to be placed for their respective pigeonhole. Stamps are kept and are given to charity to 'make money', including franked ones. No idea how. The used envelopes are then recycled.

During the day, letters get posted in two 'bins' we have here. Either regular mail out or special mail out (which can be either fast post, air mail or personal mail). Every now and then I will inspect these bins throughout the day and double check which bag they need to belong too, and then place them in their respective bags accordingly.

Mail needs to be sorted out by 9:30am, however we usually have it sorted just after 9am.

After that I start with my Notices of Sale. Two of my colleagues work in the "Pathway" database system. This is what I primarily work with. The other two work with something called "ECM" which is another side of the database. I also use it slightly.

So my colleagues that work with Pathway will divide the printed out Notices of Sale, sharing them out between the 3 of us. For some reasons, Wednesdays seem to have the most printouts. This is because the Lawyers that create these Notices of Sales like to send most of them to the head company on Fridays, which then takes until Wednesdays before they get to us. So Mon, Tues, Thu and Fridays I would process roughly 7 NOS's, whilst on Wednesdays I could be sorting out my 20+ of them, as well as my colleagues ones too who get to swamped down by them.

On a normal day, it takes me from roughly 9:00am until 11:15am to finish processing my share of the NOS. On Wednesdays I could be doing them until 2:30pm.

So, for each NOS, there are many steps I need to process. Firstly we tick off the list of things written by the lawyers. We have to check with our systems that everything they are saying matches what we have on our database. Any discrepancies I raise with my colleague Bruce, who looks at Land Online and other websites and systems to make sure that things are actually the same the lawyer is suggesting. Things like names of people, exact square meters of land being sold, numbers to refer to all this, etc.

the next process is actually changing the ratepayers. Its the exact process of changing deeds of homeowners on a database, but I'm actually changing the 'rates', or council tax as it would otherwise be known by in the UK. This involves changing their addresses on the system. I even have to input the prices of the properties being sold, often having to create new people and companies within the process.

The NOS procedure is really complex. I even have to phone the lawyers when they sometimes get stuff wrong, such as having someones address listed as a normal one when really, normal mail cannot be delivered there. Sometimes they misspell their clients names too. Not often. I kinda think its stupid that NZ Post don't deliver outside of major towns and cities. They either have a community mail box, or just have mail delivered to their nearest local shop.

The paperwork I deal with then goes to be scanned as PDF Files by my other colleagues, then comes back to me later in the day where I link the PDF's within the database called ECM. This is so that when people type the name key or the property key, the PDF can be pulled up. The paperwork then goes to be recycled.

Still with me? Good. Next thing I do is the 'Change', 'New People' and 'Change of Address'. How this works is that customer services (the call center) will process the requests by the individuals ringing us up. The query is collected with information I need to input into the database. I don't have much to work with. Usually just a name and address. Customer services often misspell so I constantly look up the true spelling/layouts with NZ Post. The most complex of these is the 'New People' which involves emailing specific people telling them that I've done the process.
This whole process is labeled as the NAR (name and address register). NAR is something which comes in drips and drabs though the day, but essentially after they are done, I don't have much else to do in the day. Take right now for example (its 3:24pm as I type this).

I have one 15min tea break every morning, around 10:30am. Then lunch at 12:30 for an hour. Then a second tea break for 15mins around 3-3:30. For lunch I go to the staff room upstairs on the 4th floor. Its a huge space dedicated to those on a break. After I eat my sandwiches I either read a book or play Pokemon.

In ECM I have been taught how to register 'Payplan Direct' slips. They are scanned as PDF's and inputted into ECM. Its just a case of someone (i.e. me) tagging the PDF files to the database things such as names, addresses etc. That can take some time depending on how many slips are in need of processing.

I also deal with duplicate name ID's in the system that need merging. Not an easy task as some names who have rates need to be at specific addresses or specific names.

My colleagues do things such as ECM and planning consents. Two of my colleagues use things such as GIS mapping which can be used to see properties from a top down perspective. It uses what is basically Google Maps however they can draw lines into it to get area square meters. This affects the rates of the property owners. They also deal with subdivisions and create new road layouts into the system in coordination with plans from land management.

At around 4pm the departments start bringing in their outgoing mail, in droves. The last hour is usually pretty busy with me checking each letter, making sure they go in the specific DX Mail bag. You would be surprised just how many international letters are put in the wrong box.

I need to get the mail trolley basket down to the Lower Basement floor by 4:45pm in time to meet the DX Mail guy who drives in to meet me and take the daily mail out.

After that its pretty much dealing with last minute NAR before 5pm. I walk home, up the very steep road called Stuart Street. Its a very busy road and it's the only exercise I get these days after giving up on swimming. I listen to my music walking to and from work on my phone. Very much like the days of listening to my Walkman on the way to and from school.

Sabine is home earlier than me.