The phone rings. It’s a Friday, and I’ve just finished opening up the little outbuilding the Parks & Recreation department’s administrative offices are in. Our field teams have been here since 6:00 a.m., trying to beat the blistering Texas heat while simultaneously taking care of our dozens of sporting fields, all of which will be utilized by one team or another over the weekend. As I reach for the phone, my computer still booting up from my sign-in, I place mental odds on what kind of caller I will have at 9:00 on the dot. I’ve barely finished my greeting when it is made very clear that the odds were not in my favor. I have a live wire on my hands, someone already spitting mad, launching into a blistering rant the second I finish saying “how can I help you?”

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When I began working for a municipal Parks & Recreation department as an administrative assistant, my expectations were colored by the antics of Leslie Knope and April Ludgate from the iconic comedy series of the same name. By and large, that expectation wasn’t far off - working for a department that championed bringing fun and play to the city we served, a lot of that same humor and joy persisted in our team culture, which I loved. Our mission and vision were tenets I genuinely believed - that the power of play was life-changing, and it was our essential function to help the people of our community enjoy the natural spaces we were charged with caring for. Having worked in customer service for a big-box retailer, I also knew that there would, of course, always be callers like this. It’s normal for people to be upset when they’re faced with a problem, and as any skilled customer-facing employee will tell you, most people just want someone to listen to them. Going into this job, I was confident that I could handle whatever the city I loved had to throw at me. After all, I was already expecting weird calls about wildlife, standard calls about park open hours, and maybe the goofy antics featured on one of my favorite shows.

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The one thing I didn’t imagine? How often people would be upset about grass. 

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As I take notes on this caller’s issue, jotting down the chief complaint she shares (grass in median higher than hood of SUV), I reflect on the number of grass-related calls I’ve had so far this week, trying to determine in advance the area this caller is referring to, hoping to provide her better customer service. It’s June in Texas, and our rapidly-growing city has a lot of areas that are under construction which have been garnering a lot of similar feedback. With a couple of well-placed questions, I’m able to break through her rage and redirect her focus to sharing the cross-streets and landmarks near the area in question. I recognize the area from not one but two calls the day before, and am able to let her know what I learned from our field team lead: this area is under construction and is being maintained by the construction crew. She’s still not happy, but willing to work with that information, and so I give her a point of contact with the construction company and transfer her directly to their team. As I make the connection, I relay the pertinent details as part of the handoff, and release the caller to the other admin. Hanging up, I say a silent prayer that my caller’s day gets better, not just for her sake, but for the sake of my fellow admin, who I’m sure will remember me from the last two frustrated callers I’ve handed off to her. I sit back in my chair, visualizing the median in question, which I drive past every day. Usually, I look forward to this stretch of the road, because the unchecked wildflowers - probably the “grass” my caller was referring to - are flourishing in the Texas heat. To me, the bright yellow sunflowers native to the blackland prairie our city was founded on are a welcome break in the concrete monotony of new construction, but I understand how someone used to our well-manicured city streets could be upset about them. I sigh, checking the time. This single call has already taken ten minutes of my day, and I wonder what I could have done to save time and solve this issue for the caller faster.

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The rest of my day is punctuated with similar calls, although no one else compares the height of the offending grass to the height of their car (and I do ask, out of pure curiosity - I’ve always been more of an April than a Leslie, after all). As I work, I keep a tally on a notecard of how many calls I’ve taken. Over the course of an eight-hour shift, I log thirty calls - low for a summer Friday. Not every conversation was as lengthy as my first caller’s, but I do some quick calculations on a sticky note. Putting down my pen, I realize that I spend about ten of the forty hours I work a week on the phone. And that’s just the incoming calls, not the outgoing calls I make to coordinate classes and events on behalf of the recipients of our charitable fund. I wonder, standing at the copier, what I could be achieving for our underserved residents if I weren’t spending a fourth of my working hours answering questions about city ordinances, wildlife, and of course, grass. It’s not that I mind talking to people, or that I dislike solving people’s problems - far from it. It’s what drew me to the job: the idea of helping as many people as possible get out there and play. As I return to my desk, I update my to-do list for Monday, starring tasks I wasn’t able to accomplish that are critical. There are more than I’d like, some with rapidly-approaching deadlines. Would I be as far behind, if there were a better way for people to get the information they need without having to call in? Would the calls I take be less frustrating for the residents, if they could get some of the information they’re looking for up front, before they have to speak to me? 

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I shoot off an email to my office manager and CC the marketing team with an idea to help streamline the process of answering questions for our residents, determined to get some of that time back in my workday. I suggest to them that perhaps an FAQ could be useful as a first-line of defense, citing that it would help not just the residents but anyone covering my desk if I’m out of office. Anyone taking a call in my absence would likely be someone whose focus is wildlife conservation or environmental services, and if there was a quick-guide resource available to them, they could continue to better spend their day helping protect the wildlife we share this beautiful city with rather than lose vast chunks of their own working time to researching ordinances and transferring calls. Creating an FAQ would help preserve the continuity of knowledge, providing a consistent experience for citizens no matter who answers the phone. It could also save me on repeat callers who were perhaps misguided on their first contact.

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Fast-forward to today, I know that past version of me was on to something when I thought about how I could get that time back. The FAQ helped, as I had hoped, but wasn’t a perfect solution. With my city growing at a steady rate, the amount of callers increased to match the population. Additionally, as the city evolved around us, the amount of information to share with residents increased as well, meaning the FAQ could quickly become outdated. Unfortunately, maintaining it ate up a few hours of the time I had anticipated getting back in my workday, and was a feature of my role until I left the city for a new opportunity. As an admin, I was unable to make the financial and policy decisions that would allow me to implement bigger ideas - no printed notes saying “I do what I want” for me, unlike Ron Swanson, also of Parks & Rec.

If I could return to that role, I-Do-What-I-Want permission slip in hand, I would do two things to supplement that FAQ. The first add-on I’d implement would be to partner with the IT and Communications departments to include a chat bot on the city’s Parks & Recreation webpage. The goal of the chat bot would be to filter out some of the basic questions new residents have, including seasonal asks (like if it’s legal to shoot off fireworks, when and how to get fishing licenses, and updates on ball field closures). 

For the bigger questions, like deep-dives into policies and ordinances themselves, I would then install Ordinal Connect. Similarly to a chat bot, it would allow residents to interact with it directly, but in this specific case, it would be able to pull nuanced, hard-to-find data from the depths of the city’s public documents and give users the answer they need in seconds, compared to the minutes it would take to find manually in the depths of the city’s website. Because it’s paired with the city’s website, the Ordinal Connect platform would stay up-to-date, giving the team using it confidence that they’re sharing the most current information with residents. 

This three-pronged approach wouldn’t be completely perfect - after all, it wouldn’t preventatively stop the grass from growing too tall - but it would be a huge step toward transparency between the city and the residents we serve. By making answers to their questions easier to find, residents would have more faith that the city is there to help them, not wrap them in red tape. Giving residents easy access to information they need would also reduce the odds of a resident getting so worked up that by the time they decide to call for help, they feel hostile and unreceptive to solutions to their problems. From an admin’s perspective, having these tools close at hand would improve employee confidence when dealing with challenging situations both internally and externally. I may not have been prepared for the number of calls people would have for me about grass when I worked in Parks & Recreation, but implementing additional tools like Ordinal Connect, chatbots, and FAQs could help future admins be prepared for everything else.