What to do about “being extremely busy at the moment”?

The season is finishing with quite a windy spell although, fortunately, nothing compared to the devastation caused by hurricanes and earthquakes in the Caribbean and Mexico. These are, of course, related: powerful storms exert huge forces on the earth’s surface and these trigger the movements which we experience as earthquakes. Climate change is more serious business than a bit of global warming.

Nearer home, there is the tricky business of the telephones in the Harbour Office. It has become quite common to ‘phone the office only to get the message that it is “extremely busy at the moment” and all you can do is hang up. This appears unfriendly but all harbours do the same on the strong advice of HM Coastguard. This is to avoid someone ‘phoning the Harbour Office with an urgent message, leaving a voicemail and thinking that something has been done. Of course, one shouldn’t ‘phone the Harbour Office when life is in danger: the proper thing to do is dial 999 and ask for the Coastguard, but that doesn’t mean everybody knows this. So harbours generally don’t have telephone queuing systems or the facility to leave a voicemail, which means that when the staff attending to the ‘phones are all dealing with calls, or helping someone at the desk, any subsequent caller gets the ‘extremely busy’ brush-off.

So the hunt is on for a better solution. Change the wording of the message? But that still means the caller gets nowhere. Divert the caller to the SHDC call centre to leave a message? Perhaps have an ’emergency’ phone in the Harbour Office, but that doesn’t help someone calling to book a mooring and could be abused anyway. Perhaps encourage people to do more business online?

The Harbour’s Annual Report for 2017 has now been published, this year in a new, handy A5 format. The report is slightly later than usual due to staff shortages in SHDC’s design department, but they have done an excellent job and the report is a good read. It is a difficult balancing act managing a municipal port during a time when local authorities have big budgetary problems. Thankfully, the Harbour is a separate legal entity and SHDC is more akin to a trustee than an owner, so the Harbour’s funds are separate and it is able to look after itself.