Tl; dr–Corporate is full of cheap idiots.
Long version–
There was an issue with our building’s fire panel buzzing last week, we called corporate support (no local support anymore–almost all support personnel at ‘small’ sites are gone), and they got it fixed. Should be the end of the story and not really much of a complaint.
Complaint #1–they didn’t actually fix anything. Or even call anyone. They just remotely disabled the alarm. To be clear, the building fire alarms/internal suppression systems are fine, this was specifically an alarm on the line that auto-called the fire department, so if they’d just told us we’d have said “Ok, please get it repaired, but until then, if the building catches fire, we’ll call 911.”
But nope. They didn’t even bother to tell the building manager. Instead they contacted the contracted facilities company and said they required our support people to be onsite 24 hours a day and walking the site every hour to ensure there was no fire.
Complaint #2–we only have two support people in total, reference all those cuts again. Four days later and with a holiday upcoming, requiring them to be onsite 24/7 is not sustainable, and the facilities guy who’s been around for years finally called our building manager to see what’s up. This was the first she’d heard of it, she called me (I run the emergency response team), and we ended up on a call with corporate where 5-10 people are all insisting “There’s nothing we can do, we can’t get a repair team out, and we can’t hire more facilities people even on a temporary basis because we’d have to put them through training. The current facilities people will just have to figure it out.”
Now, I’m still curious whether they’ve even bothered to call in the repair, but before they could bother answering that, a brilliant solution from one of them–“Wait, no, we should just call all the engineers and find volunteers to take shifts!”
Pointing out that even if they could find volunteers for 24-7 coverage (good luck in general, never in the middle of a weekend and with a holiday week upcoming), what they want is completely outside of any our job descriptions and we don’t have any of whatever ‘training’ they required either got a lot of hemming and hawing. Probably because when I finally got one of them to send me their ‘training’ documentation for this situation it consisted of
- Have a functional means of communication
- Know the address of the building
- Walk the perimeter of the building once an hour and call 911 if you see a fire OR
- Sit in front of the fire panel and if it goes off, call 911
a) Don’t do anything else while you’re staring at the panel - Fill out a log at the end of your shift
Well, that was a quick read, so…what’s the issue with increasing the facilities staff again?
“No, we definitely can’t increase facilities staff. Uh, uh, they’d have to be security screened!”
No, the fire panel is specifically in the one area of the building that’s not secured, and your own ‘training’ says all someone has to do is stare at it. So?
Mumble, mumble, “Well, I think people would be happy to volunteer!”
They would not. Why are you not hiring people?
More mumbling, and finally, “We have to consider the budget.”
At that point the site manager told them very bluntly that corporate made the mess (in several respects), it was corporate’s responsibility to fix it, and delaying a project that the CEO himself is paying very close attention to by trying to redirect engineers to stare at a panel for hours was not going to go over well, especially since both she and I (the ones they’d very much implied should be the first to volunteer) are high enough technically-speaking to be reporting out to some VP next week.
The report out is stupid for other reasons, but that threat seemed to shake a few brain cells loose, and we’ll see what actually falls out since they decided they needed to go “investigate some options” before we meet again in a few hours.
*Obviously the current facilities people are being paid, but I’m guessing there’s some sort of overtime already factored into their contract that’s being used here that wouldn’t extend if corporate had to pay for more people. And all engineers are salaried, so that’s an easy way to avoid paying anyone.
