Contact Lens

Contact Lens
A Closer Look at USP’s Contact Centre Operations
April 2023

Spring has sprung…sort of. Snow has melted, then fallen again, then melted again, then fallen again, in an endless cycle until excavators and homeowners alike throw their hands up in exasperation and collectively decide to just start digging!

In the Contact Centre, we’re beginning to see a slow trickle of locates come through, with more every week, but it’s been a relatively slow start overall to the 2023 digging season due to the unseasonably chilly and snowy weather. Of course, we wait here, crouched and ready, with bated breath and gritted teeth, because those of us who have been here before know what is to come.

May.

Of course, not just a typical May, but a May that is engorged with the locates that should have been done in April, but were instead pushed back due to an unwelcoming extension of an already lengthy winter. Not an ordinary May, but not extraordinary either. May is predictably busy, even in years where the weather warms quickly at the end of March, but what remains to be seen is just how long the business will last.

Will it dissipate and peter out as we start June? Or will we see requests continue to pour into the Contact Centre well past June and into Stampede week?

I unfortunately do not have the answer, though the safe money will always be on the latter, rather than the former!

In my imagination, our dusty arctic tundra looks like this instead.

Josef Rosenberg – Contact Centre Manager, Utility Safety Partners