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

Episode Date: March 17, 2026

The surprising power of a simple phone number to connect a community. What infrastructure mystery keeps you up at night? Submit your Service Request by recording a voice memo with your question and emailing it to [e-mail]. Service Request is a production of 99% Invisible and Campside Media. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of 99% Invisible ad-free and a whole week early. Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hello, beautiful nerds. For the next couple of 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. about infrastructure and answering them in future episodes. Here's our first story.

I guess to start, just tell me about your experience with Mr. Softie. Oh, Mr. Softie. Mr. Frikin Softie, Bain of my existence. 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. That fucking jingle comes along and it's like, oh my God, that kill me now. Dun-na-na-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. It's the end of the song that's just like taunting you because you know it's going to start again. 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'd 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. But then the next day, and the next day, and the next day, and the next day, I'm hearing Mr. Softie pull up 12, 13 stories down, park on the corner, wait for the kids, I guess. And there are multiple Mr. Softies. It's 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 it's just downstairs, the one it's a couple of blocks behind me. And they're just, it feels like at a certain point, I'm being trolled by Mr. Softie. 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. Softie problem, he started to wonder, how in the world does the city keep track of all of these calls?

Because New York City, there's what, 9 million people. They're taking calls and fire from all different directions across all the boroughs, like the smallest complaints, giant complaints. how on earth can they respond and keep track of all of that? 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 until something goes wrong. When something in your city breaks, like a busted streetlight or a pothole, you can call 311, 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. How does 311 actually work?

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. I'm so embarrassed to talk about this now, but like I went full tilt, Karen. Let's stick with Christopher's story for a moment. When Mr. Softie 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.

When you park, you have to turn that shit off. And I was like, I got you, Mr. Softie, because they were not doing that. They were full on, like, posting up on the corners below my apartment for a half hour. long time and Mr. Softy jingle time. Absolutely. That's how many repetitions of the jingle? Probably like, what? 500? Hundreds. Hundreds. Absolutely. But who's counting? Hundreds.

This was the moment when Christopher decided to call 311. He figured he had something real to report. Mr. Softie 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. 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 going to pick this up. And I was like, okay, this is classic. I'm being routed down a kind of like to a dead end. Yeah. But 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 ask me questions like, of course, what is the complaint? And I tell them that, you know, at this point, the Mr. Softie, the ice cream truck, keeps pulling up. Right. 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 going to send someone to try to catch this in this ice cream truck in the act.

And your sense is that it's probably to dispatch someone to ticket, perhaps, the ice cream truck. That's right. 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 3-1-1. That's when we come back.

To start, we'll go back to the days before 3-1-1. In the 1980s and 90s, 3-1 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 911. In some places like Baltimore, about 60% of 911 calls were for non-emergencies, and it was totally gumming up the system. Weight 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 3-1-1 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. He had the vision of taking the 3-1 apparatus and really expanding it into that full-scale customer service operation. This is Joseph Morris Row. He's been in charge of 311 in New York City since 2006.

I believe I have the best job in all of New York City. Better than the rat czar? Better than the rats are, who we work closely with. 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. 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. 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? 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.

The 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. 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.

And they pulled all that information into a knowledge management database, which then allowed, you know, 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're able to give that answer to the customer. Wow. You're describing it as, you know, 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.

It really is. NYC 311 launched on March 9, 2003. The first call to come in was a noise complaint from Jackson Heights, Queens. And soon, Bloomberg was hyping the new hotline everywhere he went. If you want to know how to register your child for school, call 311. 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've got to do is dial. 311. 311 has helped more than 216,000 New Yorkers find resources to stop smoking. These days, 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? Right. So there's a standard greeting. Thank you for calling 311. My name is Samantha. How can I assist you? 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. Softie complaint. 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. It just kind of helps smooth out the call of it and gets the agent on the role. 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. 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. 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 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. I mean, I got to get a little nosy sometimes.

And, you know, that's just the way our system is set up. 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. 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, the 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. And so what do you want the voice of the city to sound like? 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. We know New York because we are New York. And I think that translates to how we service New York. Right. Okay, so you get one of these calls. You got to make sure people are sort of calm down enough 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? 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, you know, 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 was submitted, the customer gets what's called a service request number, and that allows them to track the progress of their complaint. Got it. 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 allowed, 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? 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 insisted. 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 to figure out, hey, maybe it could be this. Like, is there something going on with the building? Is it like an unstable foundation? Once you rule out like 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 it. And, you know,

where the vibrations your neighbor is beaming to you from below. Right. Like there's no agency that handles mysterious vibrations. Right. Exactly. Not, yeah. They might be working on it. I'm not sure.

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 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 sad. 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 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. 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 start to see things and you immediately feel. 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, like 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 is going to 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 TVs. 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 going to 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 that is so funny like to walk through your neighborhood just knowing like I know who handles that right who handles that right should not be doing that exactly it's like you sort of have this code this city code you know right and then I am the 3-1-1 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 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. Oh, that's so funny. Samantha, thank you so much. I love hearing about your experiences as an operator. And I'm so impressed with the scope of what New York does. So, thank you for telling us about your work. Sure. Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure, Delaney. So nice to meet you. When we come back, we'll look at what happens when someone calls with a question, and 311 does not have the answer. 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 Morrisrow, the deputy commissioner in charge of 311, told me a story that helped illustrate how it happens. Just a few months after 311, just a few months after 311 got up and running, the city was hit with a massive blackout. It has been more than 12 hours now since the power went out here in New York City. They called Times Square the crossroads of the world. Tonight, it is the crossroads of darkness. Conductors just sit with the whole system down.

How long have you been waiting to move your train? 22 hours. The blackout affected close to 50 million people across the northeastern U.S. and parts of Canada, making it one of the largest power outages in North America. 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? 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 3-1-1. So that question went from an agent to a supervisor to a staff person who then got a whole of the Department of Health said, we need guidance on this. 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 U.S. Airways jetliner that went down in the Hudson River. When it hit the Hudson River, it just looked like a volcano exploded. Everyone on board, 155 people make it out alive. 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. Probably around 7 o'clock that night we finally felt like, okay, we get everything good, everything's under control, we can leave for the night.

All of a sudden we get a 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 the 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?

Who should they give it to? Amazing. Wow. 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. Oh, man. And so it's just become this term that prompts you guys to think, okay, there's got to be something that's that we're going to 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 used.

it in novel ways, turning millions of complaints into a real-time map of what the city needs. And there are some fascinating 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. 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. Eventually, the city mapped every 3-1-1 call about the smell and overlaid it with wind patterns. The winds at the time of the incident generally moving from west to east, indicating that the source of the mysterious odor was in Hudson or Bergen counties in New Jersey.

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. All things considered, I can think of a lot of things worse than maple syrup. So we are officially closing the case. 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 a chatbot. And I wonder if that technology is going to change 311 in the coming decade. We're looking at that closely. We're 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. 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. 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 need 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. Right. Well, Joe, thank you so much for your time. It's been just great to hear about how this service came to be. Oh, you're very, very welcome. I appreciate the opportunity. As you probably guess, I look forward to talking about 3-1-1. So I'm happy to do that.

So I thank you for that. We started with Christopher's question. How does 3-1-1 actually work? And we've got an answer. At least, sort of. When New York City launched 3-1 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 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 311. 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 NYC 311. 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 great 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. service request at 99PI.org. To see a breakdown of last year's calls to NYC 311 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. In 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 K. Levine and edited by Shoshi Shmulevitz. Mix by Iwan Li Trimuwen.

Theme song and music by Swan Reall. Additional editing by Emmett Fitzgerald and Vivian Lay. Show art by Aaron Nestor. Roman Mars is our boss at 99PI. Kathy 2 is 99PI's executive producer. Matt Cher 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 99PI at 99PI.org.