Service Request #1: What Happens When I Call 311?

Summary

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99% Invisible: Service Request #1 – "What Happens When I Call 311?"

Date: March 17, 2026
Host: Roman Mars
Series Host: Delaney Hall
Guests: Christopher Johnson (99% Invisible producer), Joe Morris Rowe (NYC311 Deputy Commissioner), Samantha Pierce (NYC311 Supervisor)
Episode Theme:
An in-depth, human-centered look at NYC's 311 non-emergency hotline: its origins, daily operations, unseen infrastructure, and how it quietly shapes both city government and the daily lives of New Yorkers.

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Episode Overview

This special episode, kicking off 99% Invisible’s "Service Request" series, delves into the unsung infrastructure of the 311 system—how it transforms citizen complaints into actionable city data, gives residents a real connection to their city, and occasionally solves mysteries like rogue ice cream trucks and the infamous “maple syrup smell.” With personal stories, insider interviews, and vivid details, listeners get to see both the literal machinery and the deeply human side of the city’s complaint hotline.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Spark: A Personal Grievance with Mr. Softee

(01:48–04:27)

• Christopher Johnson’s Problem: Christopher, a 99% Invisible producer, is tormented by relentless ice cream truck jingles during COVID lockdown in his 12th-floor apartment.
• He learns about a city noise ordinance for ice cream trucks and calls 311 to file a complaint.
  • “It feels like at a certain point, I’m being trolled by Mr. Softee.” —Christopher Johnson (03:17)
• The call prompts deeper curiosity: How can NYC handle and track complaints from 9 million people?

2. What Is 311, and Why Does It Exist?

(11:22–15:29)

• History Lesson: Before 311, nearly 60% of 911 calls in places like Baltimore were for non-emergencies, overwhelming the system.
• Baltimore launched the first 311 in 1996. NYC dramatically expanded its scope under Mayor Bloomberg starting in 2001.
• Ambition: NY’s 311 was designed to handle anything a resident might ask—not just potholes, but social services, complaints, and information.
  • “If it was a need for homeless services, if you needed food assistance, we needed to have that information in our system.” —Joe Morris Rowe (13:09)
• Back-end challenge: Consolidating all agency call centers, building a massive searchable database, and making it accessible for operators.

3. Inside the Call Center: How Does a 311 Call Work?

(16:08–21:44)

• Operator Experience:
  • Samantha Pierce, 311 Supervisor, describes:
    • Standard greeting
    • The “IVR” (interactive voice response) system that routes calls
    • Emphasis on empathy and probing for the underlying issue
    • “We need to get to the why. And that’s really how our system is navigated. You gotta get a little nosy sometimes.” —Samantha Pierce (17:44)
• Emotional Toll:
  • Dealing with odd or challenging calls—from ghost reports to “vibrations” sent by neighbors.
  • The hardest calls involve New Yorkers struggling with housing or basic needs.
    • “I legitimately can’t afford to live here. Like, what do you do with that?” —Samantha Pierce (22:15)

4. The Machinery Behind the Scenes: Data Flow & Taxonomy

(20:00–24:35)

• Service Requests:
  • Operators use preset categories and forms to route issues to the correct agency.
  • Callers get a tracking number for their complaint—unless they file anonymously (like Christopher did).
• Extreme Specificity:
  • 311’s database includes everything from “banging,” “moving furniture,” and “fireworks” to “ice cream trucks.”
  • “It’s like the city has somehow managed to catalog every possible way that people drive each other crazy.” —Delaney Hall (24:18)

5. Seeing the City Differently

(24:35–26:26)

• 311 operators develop a unique “city code” worldview—spotting infractions everywhere (e.g., TV disposal rules).
• At home, Samantha says, “I am the 311 for my friends and family.” (26:05)

6. How the Database Grows—And Handles the Unexpected

(29:32–34:51)

• From 1,000 to 7,000+ knowledge entries:
  • New information enters 311 via unexpected public needs:
    • Blackout 2003: Callers ask about insulin storage; DOH quickly provides an answer via the new feedback loop (30:47).
    • Miracle on the Hudson (2009): Calls about retrieving luggage from the river; a new protocol (“floating luggage”) is established.
      • “We always end the meeting with what’s the floating luggage that we haven’t thought about yet that may come up.” —Joe Morris Rowe (33:40)

7. Data as Urban Map & Mystery-Solver

(34:51–35:42)

• All 311 data is public and mapped in real-time, revealing city patterns and sometimes solving odd urban mysteries:
  • The “maple syrup smell” mystery: Overlapping 311 reports with wind data led inspectors to a New Jersey food plant as the culprit.
  • “All things considered, I can think of a lot of things worse than maple syrup.” —News reporter (35:42)

8. The Human Touch in a Technological Age

(35:57–37:26)

• The Future:
  • NYC is exploring AI/chatbots, but the consensus is that the “voice of the city” should remain a real New Yorker, not a bot.
    • “...not only someone talking to an agent, but in our case, it really is that it is a New Yorker who has a New York kind of beat…” —Joe Morris Rowe (36:54)

9. Epilogue: Christopher and the Nature of 311

(37:48–[End])

• The official answer: 311 is an ever-expanding, responsive system transforming citizen queries into city action.
• As for the ice cream truck? Christopher eventually just moved neighborhoods.
• Final invitation: Listeners can submit their infrastructure mysteries for future episodes.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “It feels like at a certain point, I’m being trolled by Mr. Softee.” —Christopher Johnson (03:17)
• “We need to get to the why. And that’s really how our system is navigated. You gotta get a little nosy sometimes, and, you know, that’s just the way our system is set up.” —Samantha Pierce (17:44)
• “If you help them to the best of your ability, by the end of the call, they’re grateful.” —Samantha Pierce (18:39)
• “Remember, always consider the floating luggage, and if you think your neighbor is sending weird vibrations through your floor, you might be out of luck.” —Delaney Hall (37:47)
• “There’s something sort of beautiful about a New Yorker being able to call and talk to another New Yorker.” —Delaney Hall (36:42)
• “I am the 311 for my friends and family… Sometimes I don’t like to tell people that I work here just because they’re going to text you and call you and ask you questions all the time.” —Samantha Pierce (26:05)

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Important Timestamps

• 01:48: Christopher Johnson’s anti–ice cream truck saga begins
• 04:27: Delaney Hall introduces the “Service Request” series
• 11:22: The origins and national spread of 311
• 12:28: Joe Morris Rowe explains NYC’s unique 311 ambitions
• 16:08: Operator Samantha Pierce on answering the phone and dealing with complaints
• 20:00: Explanation of “service request” workflow
• 22:15: The emotional and social complexities operators encounter
• 29:32: How the database grows (“floating luggage” and emergency events)
• 34:51: How 311 data helps solve citywide mysteries (“maple syrup smell”)
• 35:57: The coming of chatbots and the value of the “New Yorker voice”
• 37:48–End: Recap, lessons, and listener invitation

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Tone & Style

The episode maintains the typical 99% Invisible approach: friendly, curious, and warm, blending personal anecdotes with deep research and a dash of humor. The hosts and guests keep the mood empathetic and relatable in discussing bureaucratic systems, revealing the real humanity embedded in this everyday “invisible” urban infrastructure.

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Conclusion

"Service Request #1" illuminates the intricate, evolving machinery behind every New Yorker's hotline to the city. Turns out, 311 isn’t just a phone line—it’s a living reflection of the city’s needs, quirks, and collective voice. And it’s staffed by real people dedicated to solving everything from streetlight outages to ice cream truck torments—one service request at a time.

Transcript

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[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or Delaney Hall)]

Hello beautiful nerds. For the next couple weeks, we're going to be airing a new series we're producing in collaboration with Campside Media. We're calling it Service Request and it's Hosted by longtime 99pi producer and editor Delaney Hall. It's a fun and joyful and detailed deep dive into stories about infrastructure. We're looking at the nuts and bolts of how it actually works and the people who maintain it. I am very excited for you to hear it and also to get involved because we will be taking your questions about infrastructure and answering them in future episodes. Here's our first story.

[Delaney Hall]

I guess to start, just tell me about your experience with Mr. Softie, Mr.

[Christopher Johnson]

Softy, Mr. Softie, bane of my existence.

[Delaney Hall]

This is Christopher Johnson. He's a supervising producer at 99% invisible. And one of the first things I learned about him when we started working together was that he hated ice cream trucks.

[Christopher Johnson]

That jingle comes along and it's like, oh my God, that kill me now. It's that it's the end of the song that's just like taunting you because you know it's, it's going to start again.

[Delaney Hall]

About five or six years ago, Covid was just starting to hit and Christopher was spending a lot of time locked down at home. He just moved into an apartment in Washington Heights, a neighborhood at the very top of Manhattan. And he was up on the 12th floor high enough that he did not Think he'd be dealing with a ton of street noise.

[Christopher Johnson]

But then the next day and the next day and the next day, I'm hearing Mr. Softy pull up 12, 13 stories down, park on the corner, wait for the kids, I guess. And there are multiple Mr. Softies. Like, there's one, like, two blocks down. And because I'm high so high up, I can hear the one two blocks down, the one that's just downstairs, the one that's a couple of blocks behind me. And they're just. It feels like at a certain point, I'm being trolled by Mr. Softy.

[Delaney Hall]

After weeks of this, Christopher got so fed up that he took action. He decided to call 311. 311 is a hotline that provides quick and easy access to all the information you might want about city services. It's also the place where people often go to complain. And as Christopher interacted with 311 trying to solve this Mr. Softy problem, he started to wonder, how in the world does the city keep track of all of these calls?

[Christopher Johnson]

Because New York city, there's what, 9 million people? They're taking calls and fire from all different directions across all the boroughs around, like, the smallest complaints, giant complaints. How on earth can they respond and keep track of all of that?

[Delaney Hall]

I'm Delaney hall, and this is Service Request, a new show from 99% Invisible and Campside Media. We're interested in the vast and hidden machinery of modern life. The pipes, the wires, the tubes and tunnels beneath your feet. Basically, all the infrastructure that no one really thinks about about until something goes wrong. When something in your city breaks, like a busted street light or a pothole, you can call 31 1, file a report, and the city hopefully fixes it. But when you want to understand how your city actually works, that's where this show comes in. Think of us as the 311 of podcasting. We want you to send us your questions about infrastructure, and then we will investigate them and hopefully figure out the answers. For our very first episode, we have this service request from Christopher.

[Christopher Johnson]

How does 311 actually work?

[Delaney Hall]

Because it turns out the system you use to report problems and complaints is its own kind of infrastructure, one that has quietly changed how cities across the country actually work.

[Christopher Johnson]

I'm so embarrassed to talk about this now, but, like, I went full tilt.

[Delaney Hall]

Karen, let's stick with Christopher's story for a moment. When Mr. Softy got to be too much, he started Googling, and he discovered a law that had been passed about 20 years ago that said ice cream trucks had to turn off their jingles when they were idling or stopped.

[Christopher Johnson]

When you park, you have to turn that off. And I was like, I got you, Mr. Softy. Because they were not doing that. They were full on, like, posting up on the corners below my apartment for a half hour. That's a long time in Mr. Softee jingle time.

[Delaney Hall]

Absolutely. That's how many repetitions of the jingle? Probably, like, what, 500 hundreds?

[Christopher Johnson]

Hundreds, absolutely. But who's counting hundreds?

[Delaney Hall]

This was the moment when Christopher decided to call 311. He figured he had something real to report. Mr. Softee was breaking the law, and he wanted the city to do something about it. And what do you remember about the call? Just take me through it as much as you can remember.

[Christopher Johnson]

I remember that you get a greeting, and initially they try to kind of, you know, if it's this issue, go this way. If it's that issue, go that way. And at first I thought, of course, there's no real person that's gonna pick this up. And I was like, okay, this is classic. I'm being routed down a. Kind of, like, to a dead end.

[Delaney Hall]

Yeah.

[Christopher Johnson]

But I. I hung on. And someone picks up, like, a real person, A real person, a real live person. Sounds like a New Yorker, New York accent, you know, very friendly, like, ready to help. And they asked me questions like, of course. What is the complaint? And I tell them that, you know, at this point, the Mr. Softy. The ice cream truck keeps pulling up.

[Delaney Hall]

Right.

[Christopher Johnson]

What they do then is they ask you these, like, very specific questions. That's one of the things I remember, is that they're like, which days of the week? Sunday through Saturday. And I'm like, every single day. And then they say, around what time, best case scenario, they're trying to figure out when they're gonna send someone to try to catch this ice cream truck in the act.

[Delaney Hall]

And your sense is that it's probably to dispatch someone to. To ticket, perhaps, the ice cream truck.

[Christopher Johnson]

That's right.

[Delaney Hall]

Okay. Okay, got it. Christopher made his complaint. The operator took his details, and then he waited to see if anything would happen next. And as he waited, he started wondering what happens on the other side of the phone when someone calls three. One, one. That's when we come back.

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[Delaney Hall]

to start. We'll go back to the days before 311 in the 1980s and 90s. 311 did not exist in New York. In fact it didn't exist anywhere in the country. And when people had issues, even mundane ones like potholes or noise complaints, they were calling 91 1, in some places, like Baltimore, about 60% of 9, 11 calls were for non emergencies. And it was totally gumming up the system. Wait times were growing and real emergencies were getting lost in the noise. And so in 1996, Baltimore officials launched the first 311 in the country to take the pressure off of their overwhelmed 911 lines. A few years later, Chicago started its own 311 service and then Houston. These early systems were pretty simple. They were basically just call centers that could route you to the right department. But when Michael Bloomberg was elected the mayor of New York City in 2001, he had bigger ambitions.

[Joe Morris Rowe]

He had the vision of taking the 311 apparatus and really expanding it into that full scale customer service operation.

[Delaney Hall]

This is Joseph Morris Rowe. He's been in charge of 311 in New York City since 2006.

[Joe Morris Rowe]

I believe I have the best job in all of New York City.

[Delaney Hall]

Better than the rat czar.

[Joe Morris Rowe]

Better than the rat czar who we work closely with.

[Delaney Hall]

Michael Bloomberg wanted New York's 311 to handle pretty much any question or complaint a New Yorker could dream up way beyond what other cities were doing.

[Joe Morris Rowe]

The idea for New York city was if 311 is going to be the central point, we need it to be for everything. So it wasn't just infrastructure calls or questions about what day is my recycle and what day is my sanitation pickup. But if it was a need for homeless services, if you needed food assistance, we needed to have that information in our system and also have customers call us to be able to get that information.

[Delaney Hall]

That sounds like a huge task just on the back end, like getting ready to open a call center that can answer any call that comes in from a citizen. And before you could start answering the public's questions, the city had to do the work of organizing all of that information themselves. Do you know how they went about that?

[Joe Morris Rowe]

You actually just kind of recap the first year of work by a large number of people. There was no large call center in New York City at that time. Different agencies, as we call them here, may have had their own call center. Department of Transportation may have had people who answered the phones. And the Department of Sanitation had a group of folks who took calls from the public, but there was no large call center. So to solve that problem, the first take was we will consolidate all of them. Not just pull the people in, but also put it into one single location.

[Delaney Hall]

The team also had to build the software for accepting and tracking calls. And most dauntingly, they had to assemble every piece of information New Yorkers might possibly ask about and then cram it all into a searchable database for the operators.

[Joe Morris Rowe]

And they pulled all that information into a knowledge management database, which then allowed the agent handling the call to access that new system, that new CRM system to do a search very similar to a Google search. Now and then, boom, they had the answer to the question and they were able to give that answer to the customer.

[Samantha Pierce]

Wow.

[Delaney Hall]

You're describing it as a database or a content management system. And I'm thinking of it as like this bible of everything you could possibly know about New York City. And it's amazing to think about the scope of that.

[Joe Morris Rowe]

It really is.

[Delaney Hall]

NYC311 launched on March 9, 2003. The first call to come in was a noise complaint from Jackson Heights, Queens. And soon Bloomberg was was hyping the new hotline everywhere he went.

[News Reporter (archive clips)]

If you want to know how to register your child for school, call 31 1. Want to know what time the bus will pick up and drop off your child? Call 311- you can also cool off at one of the city's public beaches. For the location and hours of the nearest beach, all you got to DO is dial 31 1. 311 has helped more than 216,000 New Yorkers find resources to stop smoking these days.

[Delaney Hall]

New York's 311 receives more than 17 million calls a year, along with millions of contacts by text and through their website and their app. The call center is staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week by operators waiting to take your questions and complaints. One of them is Samantha Pierce. So take us through. How do you answer the phone and what do you ask?

[Samantha Pierce]

Right. So there's a standard greeting. Thank you for calling 311. My name is Samantha. How can I assist you?

[Delaney Hall]

Samantha was born and raised in New York City, and she's been working with 311 since 2013. She says that the first thing a caller will encounter is an interactive voice response system, an ivr. That's the menu that Christopher navigated when he called with his Mr. Softee complaint. You it basically figured out where to direct his call. And that means that once he ended up with an operator, they probably had a pretty good sense of what he was calling about.

[Samantha Pierce]

It just kind of helps smooth out the call a bit and gets the agent on the roll. Another thing that's really cool about the system is that when that topic populates, it'll take that agent to the information that they need related to that Topic. So it kind of gets a jumpstart on finding what the customer needs.

[Delaney Hall]

Noise complaints often top the list of issues that people call about, followed by illegal parking and questions about heat and hot water. But knowing the broad strokes of the issue is not enough for the operators.

[Samantha Pierce]

When we train our agents, we train them to probe, because our system is not set up like Google. Right? You go on the Google and you type in a topic, and it's going to give you what you need. We need to know the what. But really, our system is based on the why. So if you call in and you say, hey, I need to talk to the Department of Finance about this parking ticket I received, that's not going to be enough for the agent to assist. What exactly do you need? Why do you need to speak to them? What is the issue with the parking ticket? We need to get to the why. And that's really how our system is navigated. You know, you gotta get a little nosy sometimes, and, you know, that's just the way our system is set up.

[Delaney Hall]

And it's not like you're just following a script. You have to be on your toes interacting with a real human being who has a problem and figuring out what the root of it is.

[Samantha Pierce]

Absolutely. And then another thing that's really important is that a lot of people are not happy for good reason. When I coach my team, I tell them, you know, empathy is so important because if you had sewage coming into your basement, you'd be a little upset as well. And when they answer that phone, I tell them they are the city. Right. They might have a complaint about Department of Sanitation or Department of Finance, whatever the case is, they don't get to speak directly to those agencies. They're speaking to you. And in that moment, sometimes unfairly, you might get the brunt of their frustration. But if you help them to the best of your ability, by the end of the call, they're grateful.

[Delaney Hall]

And so what do you want the voice of the city to sound like?

[Samantha Pierce]

I want the voice of the city to be number one, helpful, accurate, and familiar. Because we are not outsourced. We're in New York City. And most of us are from New York City. Like, we know New York because we are New York. And I think that translates to how we service New York.

[Delaney Hall]

Right. Okay. So you get one of these calls, you gotta make sure people are sort of calmed down enough to give you the information that you need. You figure out what's actually going on with them. What happens next? How do you route that call?

[Samantha Pierce]

Okay. So the main method, I think, for reporting customers issues is through service requests, where a lot of them are preset, meaning you're just clicking on this customer wants to report a pothole, they'll click it in the sheet. Or the service request. It's already preset, so you're really just filling in information. Once we send those off, they go automatically to the responding agency. The responding agency determines how long it's going to take to fix said issue. Once the service request is submitted, the customer gets what's called a service request number, and that allows them to track the progress of their complaint. Got it.

[Delaney Hall]

Okay. There was this report that came out a few years ago about 311 with a section about memorable calls. And just to read a few of those aloud, you know, someone said, I'd like to file a noise complaint against my refrigerator, or can I claim my dog as a dependent on my taxes, or I would like to report a ghost in my window. Can you tell me about some of the maybe strangest or most memorable 311 calls you've received?

[Samantha Pierce]

I remember when I was a call taker, there was a customer that was reporting that her downstairs neighbor was sending vibrations into her apartment. And she was adamant and really insistent. And this is the thing, right? You're supposed to take the calls at face value, right? So you can't say that's not happening. What are you talking about? You can't say that. You have to do your best to try. Try to figure out, hey, maybe it could be this. Is there something going on with the building? Is it like an unstable foundation? Once you rule out kind of the real solutions that we have, you kind of have to just be honest with the customer and say, I don't think that we can take a report for the vibrations your neighbors beaming to you from below.

[Delaney Hall]

Right. Like, there's no agency that handles mysterious vibrations, right?

[Samantha Pierce]

Exactly. Not yet. They might be working on it. I'm not sure.

[Delaney Hall]

And then on a more serious note, I'm curious what kind of calls are, like, the hardest to take? Whether that's emotionally or logistically, I think

[Samantha Pierce]

the hardest calls to take are just related to the complexities or the challenges of New York City living, like the competitive housing market and people calling and saying, like, I legitimately can't afford to leave or live here. Like, what do you do with that? I think that that's a more serious topic in terms of people that are really trying to find an affordable, safe place to live. Right. But there's just also, there's always like day to day challenges of New York City. It's a noisy place. Some people don't do well with that. It can kind of get to you sometimes. Those calls always, they kind of leave you a little, a little sad.

[Delaney Hall]

New York City is a noisy place. That brings us back to Christopher. He made his Mr. Softie complaints anonymously, like a coward. And so he never got a service request number, which means we can't actually track what happened to his specific complaint. What we do know is that it would have likely been routed to the Department of Environmental Protection, the agency responsible for mitigating noise pollution. I also went digging around on the 311 website to better understand noise complaints. And. And honestly, I was kind of amazed by what I found. 311 has created this incredibly specific taxonomy of annoying sounds you can report. Air conditioners, alarms, banging, pounding, and moving furniture, which is its own category. There's boilers, construction dogs, leaf blowers, music, televisions, fireworks, generators, houses of worship, parks, pools and beaches. And if you scroll way, way down to the end of the list, you'll find ice cream trucks. Which clearly means that Christopher is not the only person in New York afflicted by Mr. Softie. To me, there's something incredible about this list. It's like the city has somehow managed to catalog every possible way that people drive each other crazy. Every grievance is accounted for. It makes me think that the way 311 operators see the city is just different.

[Samantha Pierce]

Oh. Oh, yeah, definitely. I have a deeper understanding, I guess, of how things work here. I have a deeper understanding and appreciation for just city planning. But beyond that, just you. You start to see things and you immediately think about what you would be putting in the system to fix it. Like, I remember about five years ago, there was a really specific process for disposing of electronics, specifically televisions. You couldn't just put them out with your regular trash. So I remember my husband and I were walking and I saw like a tube TV just sitting in front of someone's property. I said, oh my goodness, what are they doing? You can't put that there. And I went down this whole description of what you had to do and what the penalty. This person's gonna get a ticket. Why would they do this? And I look over at my husband, he's just staring at me like, what? You're really passionate about these tv' that was about, I would say, maybe four years ago. And as recently as last week, he will call me and say, hey, you know, I saw a TV sitting outside of this House. Like, what are you gonna do about it? Because he knows I was really bothered by people. Why aren't you following the process? Call 311 so you can find out what to do with this TV. So, yeah, that's the lens that I look at the city through. Just, hey, how can I fix this?

[Delaney Hall]

That is so funny. Like, to walk through your neighborhood just knowing, like, I know who handles that. Who handles that.

[Samantha Pierce]

Right.

[Delaney Hall]

Should not be doing that. It's like you sort of have this code, this city code, you know?

[Samantha Pierce]

Right. And then I am the 311 for my friends and family.

[Delaney Hall]

Oh, yeah.

[Samantha Pierce]

Sometimes I don't like to tell people that I work here just because they're going to text you and call you and ask you questions all the time. And while I remember a lot of the stuff, there's 7,000 different individual pieces of information. I don't have everything retained to my memory.

[Delaney Hall]

Oh, that's so funny. Samantha, thank you so much. I love hearing about your experiences as an operator, and I'm so impressed by the scope of what New York does. So thank you for telling us about your work.

[Samantha Pierce]

Sure. Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure. Delaney. So nice to meet you.

[Delaney Hall]

When we come back, we'll look at what happens when someone calls with a question. And 311 does not have the answer.

[Narrator/Host (possibly Roman Mars or Delaney Hall)]

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[Delaney Hall]

When 311 launched in 2003, its database had about a thousand discrete pieces of information about the way the city works. Today, there are more than 7,000, and I wanted to know how new information ends up in the system. Joe Morris Rowe, the deputy commissioner in charge of 311, told me a story that helped illustrate how it happens. Just a few months after 311 got up and running, the city was hit with a massive blackout.

[Samantha Pierce]

It has been more than 12 hours now since the power went out.

[Delaney Hall]

Here in New York City, they call

[Samantha Pierce]

Times Square the crossroads of the world.

[Delaney Hall]

Tonight, it is the crossroads of darkness. Conductors just sit with the whole system down.

[Samantha Pierce]

How long have you been waiting to move your train?

[News Reporter (archive clips)]

22 hours.

[Delaney Hall]

The blackout affected close to 50 million people across the northeastern US and parts of Canada, making it one of the largest power outages in North American history. Needless to say, 311 got a lot of calls and some of them were unexpected. My understanding is that power was out across the city, people's refrigerators weren't working, and people with diabetes started calling into 311 to ask, how do I preserve my insulin?

[Joe Morris Rowe]

Yeah, it's a true story. We've actually had a few of those over the years where you get an unexpected, unanticipated impact that you hadn't thought of but the call came in. And there's a process. If you don't have an answer to a question, you bring it to your Supervisor. Your supervisor brings it to our. We call it our content team. They go research it. We also have contacts at every city agency that are dedicated to working with 31 1. So that question went from an agent to a supervisor to a staff person who then got a hold of the Department of Health and said, we need guidance on this.

[Delaney Hall]

The Department of Health quickly researched the answer, and Bloomberg announced it at a press conference. Insulin can stay at room temperature for 28 days. And this whole experience showed that 311 had created something genuinely new, a feedback loop where citizens could tell the city what they needed and the city could actually respond. Joe shared another moment like this one from 311's history. It happened in 2009 when an airplane taking off from LaGuardia ran into a flock of geese and had to crash land on the Hudson River. The whole thing became known as the Miracle on the Hudson because everyone survived the crash. There's been a plane crash here in New York City. And right now you're looking at live pictures of a US Airways jetliner that went down in the Hudson River. When it hit the Hudson river, it just looked like a volcano exploded.

[T-Mobile/US Cellular Advertiser]

Everyone on board, 155 people make it out alive.

[Delaney Hall]

As the whole thing was unfolding, the team at 311 was fielding all kinds of calls. People wanted to know what had happened and if everyone was okay.

[Joe Morris Rowe]

Probably around 7 o' clock that night, we finally felt like, okay, we got everything good, everything's under control. We can leave for the night. All of a sudden, we get message from a colleague at City hall that people are calling to say, how do I get my luggage from the plane? And luggage was washing up downstream on New York and New Jersey side. So we quickly. We had literally had people leaving. We pulled them back in. They started going through finding out how we could do it. The New York City emergency management office came up with a plan on how they could collect it. And we put content in our system to tell people what to do and where to go if they needed to find their luggage, or if they were finding luggage washing up ashore, where should they take it?

[Delaney Hall]

Who should they give it to? Amazing. Wow.

[Samantha Pierce]

Yep.

[Joe Morris Rowe]

To this day, anytime we have an event that's known, a known event, weather event in particular, we do what we call a checklist, and we go through everything that's on our plan, and we try to come up with everything that's not in our plan before we kind of call it ready. And ever since that day, we call it floating luggage. So we always end the meeting with what's the floating luggage that we haven't thought about yet that may come up.

[Samantha Pierce]

Oh, man.

[Delaney Hall]

So it's just become this term that prompts you guys to think, okay, there's gotta be something that's. That we're gonna have to answer that we haven't thought about. And what could it be exactly? Today, the whole concept of 311 has spread. About 300 cities and counties nationwide now have 311 systems of their own. But New York has been a leader in making its 311 data public and using it in novel ways, turning millions of complaints into a real time map of what the city needs. And there are some fascinating stories, stories about how 311 data helps the city. For example, back in the mid-2000s, you'd be walking around the city and this weird sweet smell, kind of like pancakes, would just hit you. It was this local phenomenon that people would talk about, like, did you smell the maple syrup last night? What is that? People kept calling 311 to report it, and then inspectors would show up to try and figure out what it was. But by the time they arrived, the smell was gone.

[News Reporter (archive clips)]

We have solved the mystery of the strange maple sugar like odor that has been wafting through parts of our city during the past few years.

[Delaney Hall]

Eventually, the city mapped every 311 call about the smell and overlaid it with wind patterns.

[News Reporter (archive clips)]

The winds at the time of the incident generally were moving from west to east, indicating that the source of the mysterious odor was in Hudson or Bergen counties in New Jersey.

[Delaney Hall]

And they figured out the culprit. It was a New Jersey factory processing fenugreek seeds, which smell a lot like maple syrup. This gave New Yorkers a chance to feel smug. Of course, the weird mystery smell was coming from their, some would say less glamorous neighbor, a state known for its weird industrial smells.

[News Reporter (archive clips)]

All things considered, I can think of a lot of things worse than maple syrup. So we are officially closing the case.

[Delaney Hall]

I'm thinking about the evolution of AI and chatbots and how increasingly when you call customer service, you are not interacting with a human. You're talking with, with a chatbot. And I wonder if that technology is going to change 311 in, in the coming decade.

[Joe Morris Rowe]

We're looking at that closely. We are already exploring, we're already testing. AI is going to augment what we do. And much like the evolution from a call center to a online presence, to a mobile app, to text presence, there'll be an AI element in the future. So we'll always have options.

[Delaney Hall]

There's something sort of beautiful about a New Yorker being able to call and talk to another New Yorker, you know, and I think something would be lost if it was an automated system.

[Joe Morris Rowe]

I think you're right when you say there's always that element of not only someone talking to an agent, but in our case, it really is that it is a New Yorker who has a New York kind of beat and a New York pulse and a New York needle, talking to one of their community members, someone who may live in the same neighborhood, certainly may live in the same borough or the same city, who understands what they're looking for and is able to help them because they have the tools and they have the technology and they have the commitment. And I think it all pulls that together.

[Delaney Hall]

Right. Well, Joe, thank you so much for your time. It's been like, just great to hear about how this service came to be.

[Joe Morris Rowe]

Oh, you're very, very welcome. I appreciate the opportunity, as you probably guess I can. I look forward to talking about 31 1. So happy to do that. So I thank you for that.

[Christopher Johnson]

We started with Christopher's question, how does 311 actually work?

[Delaney Hall]

And we've got an answer, at least sort of. When New York City launched 311 in 2003, officials compiled a massive database of information about how the city works. When you call, text, or use the app, your request generates a service ticket that gets routed to whichever city agency handles that issue. And it's their responsibility from that point forward. All the data generated in the form of millions of requests gets tracked, mapped and analyzed to help the city understand what what New Yorkers actually need. As for Christopher's ice cream truck complaint, he tells us that the Mr. Softies kept coming around relentlessly and that he didn't notice any change in the noise after he called 31 1. In the end, he found a different solution. He moved to Brooklyn. With that, consider your service request resolved. Today on the show, you heard Samantha Pierce, a supervisor at NYC311. You also heard Joe Morris Row, the deputy commissioner at New York's Office of Technology and Innovation, and Christopher Johnson, senior ice cream truck hater at 99pi. What infrastructure mystery keeps you up at night? Something you use every day but don't actually understand. The card you swipe, the grate, you step over. If you're curious how it works, we want to know. Submit your service request by recording a voice memo with your question and emailing it to to servicerequest99pi.org to see a breakdown of last year's calls to NYC311 and some of the most unusual complaints. Find us on all the usual social media sites where we'll be sharing that information. And come hang out with a bunch of infrastructure nerds on the 99pi Discord. Remember, always consider the floating luggage, and if you think your neighbor is sending weird vibrations through your floor, you might be out of luck. I'm Delaney Hall. Infrastructure is everywhere and we're here to help you decode it. Service Request is a production of 99% Invisible and Campside Media. The show is produced and fact checked by Julia Case Levine and edited by Shoshi Shmulovitz. Mix by Ewen Lai Trimmer Theme song and music by Swan Rayale. Additional editing by Emmett Fitzgerald and Vivian Le show art by Aaron Nestor. Roman Mars is our boss at 99pi. Cathy Tu is 99pi's executive producer. Matt Sher is the Executive Producer at Campside. We're part of the SiriusXM podcast family. You can find us on all the usual social media sites as well as our Discord server. There's a link to that as well as every past episode of [e-mail].

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[Kelly Clarkson (Wayfair Advertiser)]

Hey y', all, it's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder what if? Like, what if it doesn't fit a

[Delaney Hall]

little to the no wait.

[Kelly Clarkson (Wayfair Advertiser)]

Yep, should have gone with Wayfair. Or what if it doesn't hold up?

[Delaney Hall]

That sofa was four days old.

[Kelly Clarkson (Wayfair Advertiser)]

Should have ordered from Wayfair. Or what if it's that material that makes that noise?

[Samantha Pierce]

It was a sofa.

[Delaney Hall]

I swear.

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With Wayfair there's no what if just style. You love quality you can trust and furniture that actually fits your life. Visit wayfair.com or download the Wayfair app.

[Samantha Pierce]

Wayfair Every style, Every home.