Thursday, June 14, 2007

No repairs, please.

There was some excitement at work yesterday. A repairman was fixing an air conditioner in someone's ceiling up the hall from my office. He did something to a pipe and suddenly there was water. Lots and lots of water. It ruined his carpet and poured out into the hall. It ran down the hall, into other offices, into the phone closet, down the stairs, threatened the computer lab, and rained in the offices of people one floor down.
Alas, budget cuts meant that they'd fired all the experienced handymen and hired contractors. Contractors who didn't know where the shutoff valves were. When they found the valves they discovered the valves didn't work. They started checking the tunnels up the street for a master cutoff for the neighborhood.
By this time we have a guy with a mop trying to slow the rising tide. A guy found a broom and was sweeping water out onto the patio. I tried removing the lip that keeps rainwater from running into the building when it rains, but there were no visible screws to remove. So what kept the water out also kept the water in.
Cleaning staff showed up from all over base with extra blankets to block off our offices. A carpet shampooer arrived and was used to start sucking up the water from the tile since the wet dry vac was taking forever to arrive. When the wet dry vac did show up it was the largest one I'd ever seen.
I don't know how they finally got the water shut off while keeping the bathrooms operating, but they did.

There was an incident.


Things got wet.


Then people showed up and they got wet, too.

No comments: