I’m starting to think the office tweeter is the most powerful person in any bureaucracy.

The internet is littered with stories about regular people getting their offline problems solved after complaining to corporations online.

Heck, we did the same thing in the aftermath of a certain automobile recall last year.

Turns out that corporate tweeters aren’t he only ones saving the day — the District government social media teams are jumping in, too.

Our permit application to park a mobile storage container on city street this weekend mysteriously stalled earlier this week, and all of the lady sparklers efforts ended up in voicemail-laden dead ends.

So, late last night I tweeted to the Districts official Department of Transportation account.

hey, @DDOTDC – we have a POD permit app that’s been stalled/ignored for a week. who can help fix tmrw before it’s delivered this weekend?

By 11:00 pm, I had an email address for the guy behind the twitter account, asking for details on our problem.

By 7:30 am, I was CC’ed on an email from him, forwarding our problem on to a team of people to solve.

By 8:30 am, the lady sparkler got a call on her cell phone from someone from DDOT saying they would clear everything up for us within the hour.

At 9:04, my wife had the permit in her hot little hands.

I don’t know how much of this little bit of awesomeness was caused by the social media phenomenon in general, or the epic person behind @DDOTDC in particular, or about just tunneling through the bureaucracy to find the actual human beings inside.

Either way, whatever is responsible — thank you.