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Friday, May 16, 2014

You can't make this shit up

I believe I have mentioned before (and if I haven't mentioned it before, you may now consider it mentioned) that my project is laid out in four interconnected rooms, lined up side-by-side, each with a doorway opening out into the hall. Between each of the rooms is a garage-door type entryway, roughly the same size as the door on a single-car garage. These doors are operated with heavy pull chains in a loop over a pulley. Very industrial. The relevance of this will become clear soon, trust me.

As I believe I have also mentioned before (and, once again, if I haven't mentioned it before, you may once again consider it mentioned), there are serious climate-control issues from room to room. At times, some of the rooms have gotten quite warm. Ours used to be consistently comfortably chilly until some shithead complained about it and the temperature promptly was changed to "sweltering." After complaints about that, we finally have settled somewhere in the "I guess I can live with it" range. Not truly comfortable, but no one is dying of heat prostration.

The people in the room next door -- think of it as room A in the four-room progression from right to left facing the rooms from the hallway, with my room as room B -- unfortunately seem to believe their room is too cold. First of all, I've been in there quite a bit, and they are simply wrong. Second, though, is that they have forgotten the first rule of temperature: if it is too cold, you can add clothing until you are comfortable, but if it is too hot, you can't get but so naked. The dress code here might be lax, but it does require that you actually stay dressed. So you know they are asking for trouble -- I have no doubt it will get hot in there real quick.

But that apparently still is in the future. For now they are doing stupid things with doors. Yesterday, they decided it would improve the temperature in their room if they kept the door to the hallway closed. This is, naturally, the easiest door to use for most of us in my room to go into the hallway and down to the restrooms. That makes it the easiest door to use to return, as well -- except you have to enter a code into a keypad to enter the room from the hallway, so we go around to the room that enters Room B from the hallway. Longer, but less of a pain in the ass.

To the surprise of no one sitting anyplace other than Room A, this tactic did not work. The problem, apparently, was not Arctic winds sweeping into Room A from the hallway. Shocker.

Next up in their bag of stupid temp tricks was to convince management that the thermostat in Room B somehow controls the temperature in Room A, even though there is no evidence this is true and Room A has a thermostat of its own. So a couple admin pukes came into Room B a little while ago and announced that our thermostat was going to be adjusted from its setting of 65 (it isn't cooling the room to 65 because of the concentration of breathing bodies and head-emitting devices we use to do our jobs -- it struggles to keep things under 75) to a balmy setting of 75 so that Room A would be warmer. The cries of outrage from Room B scotched that plan immediately.

The Whiners then concluded that the problem actually was the Arctic winds sweeping into Room A from Room B, and they convinced the admin pukes (who actually are nice people) to close the garage door between Room A and Room B. The loading-dock style, corrugated steel, controlled-by-heavy-chains-looped-over-a-pulley industrial door. That one. (I told you the doors would become relevant.)

Within minutes of the door clattering and rattling down, one of the admin folks came back into the room and raised it again. Somebody must have figured out that might constitute a fire-safety hazard.

So I don't know if the Room A Whiners have further plans to influence the temperature in their room. Personally, I'm in favor of going back to their earlier attempts and closing the loading-dock door and the hallway door. And locking both of them. From the outside.

I keep trying to tell you people. Temp Town is a strange place.

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