Meeny Molar
Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.
Friday, January 16, 2004
Saying hi to the good dr conrad
Just saying hi to a good friend who's developing software here in Western Australia, and whose website is at metaplay here - take a look at Glyph in action...
Sunday, January 18, 2004
Remember Pride In Incompetence? Part Two.
Remember me posting about that subject a few months back? Well here's another company that revels in its own incompetence, a property manager for commercial properties who happen to be our landlords at work. (Neither is mentioned by name to prevent anyone working it out.)
We've been in the building for almost two years. Moved there in order to be closer to the Central Business District, and because the old premises had been allowed to run down to the point of looking downright seedy and filthy. (Why that's bad for business is in the Sandlot Shops article a few months back...)
About a week after the first half of the office shifted, I began to wonder why every cubicle had desk fans... Six months later when we shifted in fully, I knew... The place was hot! All glass, especially on a North facing wall in the Southern hemisphere, is a BAD idea...
We bought fans for our people, because the previous tenants took theirs with them.
I joined the Fire Wardens organisation in the building, and immediately began to see other problems. Like, the public address system was just plain outclassed in the building, most of the tenancies on most floors couldn't hear the announcements and in many cases, not even the alarm tones.
And in our first year there, the security system wasn't programmed for the New Years Day nor the Australia Day public holidays and so we were burgled of four laptops that first New Years, because that was a weekday and all the doors and lifts were wide open for business...
It takes a special kind of incompetence to fail to program a public holiday, and an almost fanatical devotion to idiocy to forget not only two public holidays in a year, AND THEN REPEAT THE SAME MISTAKE THE NEXT YEAR. I'm not kidding. And I'll almost bet that the Australia Day will be similarly forgotten this year.
Of course, we had police forensics in to check the floor, and they firstly and immediately pointed out that our 'deadlocked security doors' which we were told we had, couldn't actually reach the deadlock position and could therefore have been opened with a credit card provided one could get accesss to the floor....
Suffice it to say, we aren't and weren't impressed, we have spent thousands putting an alarm and door access control system on the whole floor of a theoretically secure building, and guess what, our system is the same model as the building's, and ours has never skipped a beat.
The fire wardens recently held a full evac drill, and the fire department rep who was on site with us presented the landlords with a list of fire system failures. Five weeks later we discovered that there were suddenly even more faults, most created by the landlord in the last few weeks. One involved cluttering the already tiny fire control room with blankets from teh freight lift.
I put those blankets outside the control room on tuesday and faxed the landlord to say that I'd taken this step because it had been reported for five weeks and that was too long a time to have such a hazard unattended, and would they please collect their stuff and put it in a store room not the control room.
Next day I got a call from the building super to tell me he'd be there that afternoon to put the blankets back as there was 'no toher place that was easy to get to' to put them in. I told him that if they did there'd be a charge laid under fire regulations. On Friday the super showed up with his manager in tow, and guess what? In the intervening time, the blankets had been pinched. Bad luck...
I imagine the super thought that with his manager there we'd cave in, but instead I sent them out with a few choice words (mainly about Australian Standards and fire safety equipment I seem to recall) and they left pretty much fuming and ready to explode but knowing they couldn't.
The building held its first tenants meeting that afternoon, and lo and behold even before we'd sent a letter to the landlords, things got done about some of the PA gear and other things we'd been asking about...
Not done properly of course nor has it been finished, but that's for the next tenants meeting to act on...
We'll see.
These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one.
I'm shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world.
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