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So I arrive at work and find all of the exterior lights are out.
So much stupid.
"What happened to your lights." got that question at least 20 times in my first 50 customers.
I understand that you're curious. Do you understand how unlikely it is that I would know anything you don't? I'm not an electrician, nobody here is an electrician, an electrician has been summoned. He will probably find the answer to that question. And that answer will not fit into the thirty seconds that your transaction will take. Or were you planning on wasting the time of everyone behind you in line?
Ma'am, I really think you should have anticipated this issue before you got in line. I generally expect an adult to know they need to know their pump number before entering the store (though I am often disappointed), but when there are no lights in the pump area or anywhere outside the store, turning the front window of the store into a near-perfect mirror that completely obscures the view outside so that I cannot even see the cars that are less than ten feet away from me, I am not going to be able to help you figure out which pump you parked at.
Your comment implying that you were the only car at the pumps is clearly wrong, as my register shows two pumps have people already pumping gas. That narrow the possibilities for which pump you are at to six.
"Are y'all gonna get your lights fixed?' Lady, you were here two-and-a-half hours ago: there wasn't an electrician here then, there isn't one here now, it seems unreasonable for you to expect the work to have been completed by now.
Yes they are going to be fixed, no I don't know when. But I am hardly surprised that the repair didn't happen between 11:30pm and 2am.
But the stupid wasn't just the customers.
The issue with the lights was noticed around 9:30pm and the company that handles that for the company that owns the building was notified immediately. The tech called about an hour later and the person who answered the phone said we did not have access to the Electrical Room so he'd have to wait for the Manager at 5am.
Things wrong with this include that she knew I come in at 11pm and have keys to everything, and that the key to the Electical Room, clearly labeled as such, was hanging from a thumbtack in the cork bulletin board right next to her register, within arm's reach as she rang people up.
What was wrong with the lights was the interface of a poor choice to computerize something that didn't need to be computerized, possible underthink in the design of that computer, poor installation of that computer, and a building apparently built as an experiment in exactly how cheaply that could be done.
Despite the fact that photocells to control exterior lights (turn them on when it gets dark out) have been reliable for decades, somebody decided a while back that ours should be run by a computer that uses our exact longitude and latitude and the time of sunrise/sunset as provided by the internet to turn the lights on and off. This device apparently cannot be made to understand that on days where it is cloudy or raining, it gets light out later and dark out sooner. That last part isn't immediately relevant, but is part of the pile of stupid.
This "computer" is really a big solid-state circuit board with components connected to the board with solder. This is pretty standard, and why it is an issue will become apparent.
The box the computer is installed in is a fairly standard metal equipment box to be bolted to a wall. It has many holes in it where cables go through, and some are large enough to stick fingers through. Also the door doesn't stay closed.
Just one example of how cheap the building is, we had an HVAC tech come to address an issue of it being particularly cold at Register One, which was because Register One is directly under one of the roughly ten vents in the store. He solved this by installing a "diffuser", one of those square things with layers of concentric squares mounted at an angles that deflect the airflow sideways. He said they are about $2 each. For some reason we just had plastic grilles over the vents.
A glaser replacing a broken window had similar disparaging things to say about the way the glass was installed: apparently rather than build an actual window frame they mostly caulked the glass into place.
So given how cheaply it was built, and that the building is almost 20 years old, it's hardly surprising that the roof sprang a leak.
Have you guessed it?
The roof leaked, and the water leaked through the ceiling of the Electrical Room.
It ran down the wall and into the box with the light controller in it.
It ran across all those exposed solder points and shorted a bunch of stuff against other stuff.
This predictably caused the device to stop working properly. Even the large button designed to turn the lights back on when the machine stupidly turns them off wouldn't work. (It looks just like an Emergency Stop button except it's green not red.)
So the roof leaks. The building was not properly designed to deflect roof leaks away from the room with all the circuit breakers. The device with exposed circuitry was not put in a box designed to keep water out, and the box it is in won't even stay closed. And so the computerized light controller that was a bad idea to begin with became a single point of failure that took out our signs, our security lights, our parking lot lights, our gas canopy lights, and all the lights at the entrance to the store. Every single exterior light is run by that single device, as opposed to multiple systems each with its own photocell so that if one system fails we still have partial lights.
It took a lot of bad decisions to get us to this point.
So. Much. Stupid.
So much stupid.
"What happened to your lights." got that question at least 20 times in my first 50 customers.
I understand that you're curious. Do you understand how unlikely it is that I would know anything you don't? I'm not an electrician, nobody here is an electrician, an electrician has been summoned. He will probably find the answer to that question. And that answer will not fit into the thirty seconds that your transaction will take. Or were you planning on wasting the time of everyone behind you in line?
Ma'am, I really think you should have anticipated this issue before you got in line. I generally expect an adult to know they need to know their pump number before entering the store (though I am often disappointed), but when there are no lights in the pump area or anywhere outside the store, turning the front window of the store into a near-perfect mirror that completely obscures the view outside so that I cannot even see the cars that are less than ten feet away from me, I am not going to be able to help you figure out which pump you parked at.
Your comment implying that you were the only car at the pumps is clearly wrong, as my register shows two pumps have people already pumping gas. That narrow the possibilities for which pump you are at to six.
"Are y'all gonna get your lights fixed?' Lady, you were here two-and-a-half hours ago: there wasn't an electrician here then, there isn't one here now, it seems unreasonable for you to expect the work to have been completed by now.
Yes they are going to be fixed, no I don't know when. But I am hardly surprised that the repair didn't happen between 11:30pm and 2am.
But the stupid wasn't just the customers.
The issue with the lights was noticed around 9:30pm and the company that handles that for the company that owns the building was notified immediately. The tech called about an hour later and the person who answered the phone said we did not have access to the Electrical Room so he'd have to wait for the Manager at 5am.
Things wrong with this include that she knew I come in at 11pm and have keys to everything, and that the key to the Electical Room, clearly labeled as such, was hanging from a thumbtack in the cork bulletin board right next to her register, within arm's reach as she rang people up.
What was wrong with the lights was the interface of a poor choice to computerize something that didn't need to be computerized, possible underthink in the design of that computer, poor installation of that computer, and a building apparently built as an experiment in exactly how cheaply that could be done.
Despite the fact that photocells to control exterior lights (turn them on when it gets dark out) have been reliable for decades, somebody decided a while back that ours should be run by a computer that uses our exact longitude and latitude and the time of sunrise/sunset as provided by the internet to turn the lights on and off. This device apparently cannot be made to understand that on days where it is cloudy or raining, it gets light out later and dark out sooner. That last part isn't immediately relevant, but is part of the pile of stupid.
This "computer" is really a big solid-state circuit board with components connected to the board with solder. This is pretty standard, and why it is an issue will become apparent.
The box the computer is installed in is a fairly standard metal equipment box to be bolted to a wall. It has many holes in it where cables go through, and some are large enough to stick fingers through. Also the door doesn't stay closed.
Just one example of how cheap the building is, we had an HVAC tech come to address an issue of it being particularly cold at Register One, which was because Register One is directly under one of the roughly ten vents in the store. He solved this by installing a "diffuser", one of those square things with layers of concentric squares mounted at an angles that deflect the airflow sideways. He said they are about $2 each. For some reason we just had plastic grilles over the vents.
A glaser replacing a broken window had similar disparaging things to say about the way the glass was installed: apparently rather than build an actual window frame they mostly caulked the glass into place.
So given how cheaply it was built, and that the building is almost 20 years old, it's hardly surprising that the roof sprang a leak.
Have you guessed it?
The roof leaked, and the water leaked through the ceiling of the Electrical Room.
It ran down the wall and into the box with the light controller in it.
It ran across all those exposed solder points and shorted a bunch of stuff against other stuff.
This predictably caused the device to stop working properly. Even the large button designed to turn the lights back on when the machine stupidly turns them off wouldn't work. (It looks just like an Emergency Stop button except it's green not red.)
So the roof leaks. The building was not properly designed to deflect roof leaks away from the room with all the circuit breakers. The device with exposed circuitry was not put in a box designed to keep water out, and the box it is in won't even stay closed. And so the computerized light controller that was a bad idea to begin with became a single point of failure that took out our signs, our security lights, our parking lot lights, our gas canopy lights, and all the lights at the entrance to the store. Every single exterior light is run by that single device, as opposed to multiple systems each with its own photocell so that if one system fails we still have partial lights.
It took a lot of bad decisions to get us to this point.
So. Much. Stupid.
They had to shave about two feet off each patient room to squeeze the fire escape in. Now the patient rooms are too small and awkward to get around in. So much for the design marvel.
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