High Tech City Hall

I love all the new features and services they are adding over at the City of Valdosta’s website. I’ve been waiting forever to start saving 36¢ a month on mailing in my water and sewer bill. From the looks of things, I still have a long time to wait.

First, you must sign up to get an online account. You are ISSUED a user name of a long string of incomprehensible numbers. The site tells you it will e-mail you a password in a few moments to verify you. They neglect to send along your user name with your password. I didn’t bother to write down that number so I figure I have one chance to pay my bill online before I die.

It gets better, or worse, depending.

You have to put in your utility bill account number and a SIX digit (they spelled it DIDGIT) pin number. Even the Bank of America is happy with just four numbers!

Its pretty obvious that they forgot to ask me about my social, drivers license, and EIN back when I opened my account 23 years ago because now they want to know it. I have to call customer service to clear this matter up — they don’t know who I am.

Come to think of it, my first wife signed up for the water back in 1980 so its probably under her social. She left 27 years ago and counting and that’s an awful lot of water (bills) over the JoRee Pond Spillway.

Security is all well and good, but I am very happy to let anyone know my virtual city hall login so that they can pay my water bill for me. Any takers?

The high tech program at City Hall moves forward – I see that the City Fathers have unanimously approved the spending of $119,000.00 to purchase 20 video cameras to hook up the new Traffic Management Center so that operators can look at “strategic” intersections in order to control traffic flow. Now there is something worth putting up on the city website — web cams!

Say you are sitting in an office in the industrial park and want to see if its raining over at Five Points. Click click and you can see if there is any pitter patter cross town. Cool!

Run out of gas? No problem. Just run out into the intersection and start wiggling your fingers in sign language. If the guys at the traffic center don’t help you out you can sue the city for audism. That’s the term deaf people use for the hearing enabled that diss them. Don’t ask me to sign that out.

It will even be possible for the morning DJ to look over the web cam display and tell you what traffic is really like out there. I am sure some radio station will do that as soon as they can find some sucker to trade out a computer for advertising.

Oh heck, they’ll probably want you to have a user name and a 16 didget PIN number in order to access any of it. Hey, its our $119,000.00! Let us look, too!

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Tagged as: Computers