Why must we wait until it's completely broken before it gets fixed?

[CrazedClerkthe2nd]

I use elevators at work. One in particular I have to use all the time. About two months ago it started acting up. I told my superiors.

It got progressively worse, I continued to tell my superiors in the hopes something would be done.

Six weeks go by and the elevator is barely working. I can't get a straight answer out of anyone about when it might get fixed.

One week later one of my CWs gets stuck in the elevator for about 40 mins. Miraculously after this, I get told the thing is finally fixed now and it was only a minor electrical problem.

Three days later I get stuck in the elevator...for about 30 minutes.

After that fiasco the unit is finally, FINALLY repaired properly.

But if they had only listened to me and fixed it in the first place we could have saved so much time and frustration.

[sstabeler]

you think that's bad? the elevator at my job hasn't worked the ENTIRE time I've worked there ( it'll be 2 years as of the first of June). Despite breaking down approximately once per week on average (once it broke twice in a single day) and allegedly being replaced ( I assume they mean the cables and such, because the actual elevator car definitely wasn't replaced) along with various other problems (door close button doesn't work, for one thing. the other is the thing stopping and the door opening without the floor being level( roughly the equivalent of a large step when it happened to me, but still... That and a mehtod of deciding if ti's goig up or down that can be... unusual, shall I put it that way. which is annoying whne you need to get back to your desk from lunch and the elevator takes a quarter of an hour to fail to turn up. (I gave up and took the stairs.)) and it still hasn't been properly fixed. best guess is it'll be fixed about two seconds after someone high up in the company gets trapped in it.

[Redhead17]

Our elevator is getting worse and worse too. It has trouble closing its doors, and it takes forever to get upstairs. I was also stuck in it for about 7 minutes, with another co-worker and lots of things we were taking downstairs.

[evilhomer]

I work in a lot of different buildings and some of them are just ridiculous. There are a couple of buildings that I outright refuse to work in because I know I'll get trapped one of these days. There's one building where the repair guys are in there literally every week; it needs a complete overhaul or replacement, but they keep coming in, fixing it just enough, and come back next week when it breaks down again.

A little bit of irony on a move we just did. We moved them out of a building slated for demolition that had brand new elevators, we moved them into a new(er) remodelled building that had ancient elevators.


On the subject of the topic line, it drives me nuts when assclowns wait until something completely breaks. I can't count the number of times I go in because a cabinet door is loose and/or falling off. If they had called when the problem started, it would literally be a 10 second fix to tighten a screw. But no, they bend it, they twist it, they pull it until it's completely fucked up and I've got to spend half an hour engineering a solution. This is from people that know I'm in the building on a weekly basis. I'm at the point where if it's not the 10 second fix, it gets written up as "damaged by user, unrepairable".

[dalesys]

I sometimes worked in a 3 story building where the motor for the freight (and only) elevator was the operator... pull the rope on one side for up, pull the other side for down.

[CrazedClerkthe2nd]

I did have a contractor tell me once that he purposefully does only the minimum he needs to do for a repair because repeat calls for him to come out and fix the thing mean more money in his pocket (he gets to bill for every call).

This is NOT a contractor I nor my company has ever used.

[evilhomer]

I did have a contractor tell me once that he purposefully does only the minimum he needs to do for a repair because repeat calls for him to come out and fix the thing mean more money in his pocket (he gets to bill for every call).

That reminds me of some elevator guys in a building that I regularly work. They were replacing the cables in all the elevators. While they were doing this work (and taking the heavy cables into the service elevator), the service elevator was perfectly level, there was no lip at all between the floor and the base of the elevator. The day, or more specifically, the afternoon they were finished and leaving, there was a 1 inch lip at the elevator. I'm sure they did that intentionally to get one more call in at the building. Of course the building was too cheap to do anything about it, so everybody had to suffer with it.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Why must we wait until it's completely broken before it gets fixed?

Are you trying to apply common sense to Management?

You should know that's a quest that's doomed to fail.

[Draper Mel]

At my old theater, we parked the shop minivan in the hotel parking garage directly behind us. The west elevators in that garage were scary. They would make lurching motions sometimes, or stop above or below the floor. Once we were in one that stopped entirely between floors and opened up to a concrete wall! We all screamed, somebody pressed another floor button, and then it was fine. They eventually shut them down and replaced them.

[LillFilly]

Well, of COURSE it's not going to get fixed! It's only employees being inconvenienced after all!

[wolfie]

When I worked in computers, one company had 2 buildings across the street from each other. The building I worked in, the employee entrance was solid (no window). It was a regular occurrence for someone coming in to be hit in the face when someone coming out opened the door. Naturally, there were complaints to management, but nothing was done about it.

One day, somebody carrying a piece of prototype hardware to be shipped to a trade show was hit by the door being opened from inside, and almost dropped the hardware. Within a week, there was a window in the door - shows the relative value management put on employees and equipment.

[TopEndDave]

In my current job we relocate computers for our client. One of the client's buildings was being renovated and they were finally replacing the dodgy elevators. Unfortunately this was the last part of the renovation as they were also adding a floor to the building. It took about 6 months and we had to keep moving people around as different parts were worked on. One of the two elevators would break down just about every time we did a move. There would be the furniture movers, the client's staff and us all trying to use one elevator. The client would get upset and send us off site until the broken elevator was repaired. Of course it was the bare minimum fixes as they were about to replace all the elevators.

[sstabeler]

that's actually about the only situation where the bare minimum fix is appropriate, I would think. (when the item is being replaced soon regardless. If the item is only going to be used for another month, a cheap patch that will last the month may well be more appropriate than an expensive fix that would lats longer. The idea being that by the time the elevator fails again, it'll be time for the replacement to be put in.)

[Ben_Who]

The elevators in this building used to be...programmed kind of weird. They seemed to assume that only one person would use the elevator at any given time, treating each command as an entirely separate job.

As an example, if you called an elevator to the ground floor, and, as it was coming down, it picked up someone who also wanted to go to the ground floor, it would treat that as two trips. It would come down, land, open the doors, let the other person out, close them, and then open them again for you. So if you got on as the other person was getting off, you had to wait while the doors closed, opened, and then closed again.

And if you hesitated slightly in getting on the elevator as the other person was getting off the doors would close on you. Hard. WHAM. Then they would open to let you on, close again, open AGAIN, and close again before delivering you somewhere. If you waited on the landing for the doors to reopen, the elevator might take off to pick up someone else first, as if you were on a to-do list and it hadn't gotten to you yet. Sometimes it would forget to pick you up entirely.

A lot of people wound up spending a hell of a lot of time on the elevator as you'd get on with two other guys in the lobby, the other two would push 8 and 12, you'd push 14, and the elevator would go up to 8, then back down to 4 to pick up someone who wanted to go to the lobby, up to 6 for no particular reason, back down to 2 to pick up someone who wanted to go to the penthouse (passing 12 and 14 on the way), get around to 12, pick up someone who wanted to go down, flap its doors twice in the lobby, and finally get to 14. Most of these were secured floors - there WAS no staircase access. And we're the employees - I can only wonder at what the clients must have thought.

[Mikkel]

A lot of people wound up spending a hell of a lot of time on the elevator as you'd get on with two other guys in the lobby, the other two would push 8 and 12, you'd push 14, and the elevator would go up to 8, then back down to 4 to pick up someone who wanted to go to the lobby, up to 6 for no particular reason, back down to 2 to pick up someone who wanted to go to the penthouse (passing 12 and 14 on the way), get around to 12, pick up someone who wanted to go down, flap its doors twice in the lobby, and finally get to 14. Most of these were secured floors - there WAS no staircase access.

I'm glad I had just swallowed my coffee, otherwise I would have had to clean the taxi.
At least you never got bored when you went out on quest.