If only we had a psychic phone that knew when things broke
There are two main reasons that I'm glad I don't work in maintenance.
1) Clearing snow at 6am
2) Last minute calls:
Our maintenance team is here Monday-Friday 8-5 plus is on call for emergency maintenance and snow removal whenever it may needed. I had someone call in late November just before six o'clock on a Friday saying that she knows she should have called about this earlier but that her friend had messed with her thermostat and now she hasn't had heat for two weeks and it was starting to get colder. So, since no heat is an emergency, maintenance had to come in special on the spot within the hour to fix it when they could have more easily fixed it any time in the past two weeks.
Worse still though is when people try to use how long something has been broken as a bargaining chip, even though we can't fix things unless they call us that something is broken. I had someone call at 5:50 on a Friday, wanting somone to come out that evening to fix her clogged sink (not an emergency). I let her know that I would put it in so they could get to it first thing on Monday. "But that's a long time" she said, upset, "It's been broken since Thursday morning!"
1) Clearing snow at 6am
2) Last minute calls:
Our maintenance team is here Monday-Friday 8-5 plus is on call for emergency maintenance and snow removal whenever it may needed. I had someone call in late November just before six o'clock on a Friday saying that she knows she should have called about this earlier but that her friend had messed with her thermostat and now she hasn't had heat for two weeks and it was starting to get colder. So, since no heat is an emergency, maintenance had to come in special on the spot within the hour to fix it when they could have more easily fixed it any time in the past two weeks.
Worse still though is when people try to use how long something has been broken as a bargaining chip, even though we can't fix things unless they call us that something is broken. I had someone call at 5:50 on a Friday, wanting somone to come out that evening to fix her clogged sink (not an emergency). I let her know that I would put it in so they could get to it first thing on Monday. "But that's a long time" she said, upset, "It's been broken since Thursday morning!"
December 15, 2009 at 9:35 PM
Oh, it's true, the maintenance on-call people have it bad.
Just ask the guys from the Beach House on all those nights we called them with our flooded bathroom... :) top