Office airconditioner’s knackered. Ordinarily I’m not one to be worried about such things (unlike some of my co-workers, who regard 16 degrees as “a heatwave”), however it’s presently got 2 particularly useless options. You can either get it to dispense warm air, or it’ll put out hot air.
We rang the building maintenance people last week about it, and received the entirely unhelpful response: “Yes, we know about that – everyone on that floor’s got the same issue, so rest assured it’s not just you. We’ve got engineers working on it right now, and it’ll be resolved shortly. We’ll let you know as soon as we know anything”. Interesting interpretation – that we were ringing out of jealousy toward our suave air-cooled neighbours rather than out of the fact that the aircon was, as they say, fucked.
Predictably, a week later, we’d not heard any further which meant – based on our last exchange – either:
- Nothing’s happened.
- They don’t know anything.
I’d be inclined to lean toward the second option generally anyway.
Team leader Cath rang up with a slightly more results-focused tone in her voice, and shortly afterwards a representative came up to be more reassuring in person, whilst delivering the same message. Maybe it was Cath’s invocation of the magic incantation, “So, what are you going to do for us in the meantime?” which was the elusive catalyst for action, but the lady sheepishly offered that they had some portable coolers which we could have one of if we liked.**
And so the cooler was duly brought in, filled with water, switched on, and then swiftly abandoned by the bloke in overalls.
Now instead of a device that moves warm or hot air around the office, we have a very noisy device that delivers unbelieveably humid tepid air to the office, with the only means of maintaining a bearable environment are to have the window open as far as it’ll go, and have the fire door chocked open. At least the noise from the cooler drowns out the noise from the traffic outside the window (which is why we don’t normally have it flung open).
Seems that the only effective cooling device on this floor – the refrigerated Coke machine – has been switched off, because without aircon roaring all day it makes the kitchen too hot.
Never a dull moment round here.
** This is where I wonder what life would have turned out like if I wasn’t such a fiendishly good web developer. If I was in charge of a building and someone had phoned me up to say the aircon was on the fritz, I suspect I’d have immediately offered them a cooler as a backup, rather than firing excuses out as fast as possible and waiting until I was sepcifically asked about contingency.
