My “Office Space”

When it rains, it pours…. and on some occasions, such as this morning, it pours without raining. (Although it has threatened to all day.) The sky is grey and gloomy, just the way I like it, and I should be outside enjoying this all-too-infrequent weather, but instead, I’m trapped in my office and all hell has been breaking loose (the pouring I referred to will be explained momentarily.)

It began with payroll. Normally, I don’t mind it. Every other Friday I resign myself to spending a good part of my morning scrutinizing time-sheets and calculating hours. I do need to concentrate and generally don’t deal with other issues until the almighty payroll template has been successfully emailed to my corporate office. It works out well because my boss generally doesn’t consider Fridays to be workdays, so I usually have peace and quiet to get the job done. This morning didn’t allow for that. No,…it brought with it the kind of chaos you can only find in movies like “The Money Pit” and “Fun with Dick and Jane.”

I should start by saying that I work in the office of a Wastewater Reclamation Facility or “sewer plant” for those of you who like to keep it real. LOL
It usually doesn’t smell too bad. Really. We have odor scrubbers, etc., that keep the reality of what we deal with to a minimum. However, when certain failures occur, such as the broken air-line this morning, the smell increases tremendously. Upon arrival at the plant today, I was greeted with…to put it as nicely as possible…. a very pungent odor.

I settled in at my desk and tried to ignore the smell as I fumbled through time-sheets. As I began the normal data entry process, a passing coworker commented that he thought something was dripping in the file room. I went to investigate and found that one of the fire sprinklers was indeed dripping water onto the floor.
This concerned me, not just because water coming from ceilings is widely accepted as a problem, but because the room it was dripping into contains the personnel, accounting, and contract files for several facilities. I informed the Maintenance Manager, who called someone at the company who deals with dripping fire sprinklers.
I waited for them to arrive, staring nervously at the sprinkler which continued to drip into a small bucket I had placed on the floor….and contemplated all possible horrors that could occur… (I was reminded briefly of the commercial in the 80′s for that gum called “tidal wave”)…
I tried to focus on my payroll entry when the phone rang. It was a woman from a company sent to look at our broken front gate. She said she would be arriving in a few minutes and wanted my Maintenance Manager to meet her at the gate to discuss options. I tried to call him on his cell phone, but was greeted instead by a very friendly woman who explained that she was his mother and he had left his cell phone at her house. I called someone else and asked them to find him for me.
That’s when the gate intercom began to beep,… repeatedly. I tried to ignore it. This is just about the time our client walked in. My company is subcontracted to operate this facility for a municipality, and we answer to their Utilities Director. He had received a call from another company down the street (who happens to create microchips and uses water discharged from our facility.) Apparently, they have been having trouble with their process and are blaming it on our water…and consequently our reclamation & discharge process (or something like that.) In a nutshell, our client is not a very happy camper.

This is about the time my Maintenance Manager came in to check on the dripping. He brought a ladder and flashlight and proceeded to open up a panel in the ceiling of the room next to the file room where we happen to keep our coffee pot.

So…. there I sat…. with my client and a couple of supervisors at my desk discussing (quite loudly) the goings on with the water, the gate intercom beeping, water dripping into the file room, and my Maintenance Manager on a ladder tearing open the ceiling. The phone rang again.

This time, it was the manager of a janitorial company that we fired back in July. He decided to call and try to get another year of payments out of us for not cancelling our contract by the deadline. (He is dead wrong, by the way. We have corresponded back and forth for weeks, and I’ve about had it with him.) Anyway… he decided today would be a good time to haggle a little more over an issue that I have already turned over to my legal department.

I would like to interject that by this point, it was about 10:00 in the morning and I usually have payroll done by 9:30 or so.

Just as I was attempting to wrap up my phone call, I heard a loud gushing noise and some sort of profanity from the sprinkler company guy. I turned around to see him lifting a 5 gallon bucket up to the ceiling to catch the downpour (Yes, this would be the aforementioned pouring.)

Once the mess was cleaned up, the phone call finally ended, the gate lady left, and I managed to get the payroll entered(BARELY by the deadline), I thought it would be nice to get a cup of coffee.
As it turned out, when my Maintenance Manager opened up the ceiling panel, a few things that have been up there for the past decade dropped in the general vicinity of my coffee pot. As I reached for a stir stick, I was mortified to find them covered in mouse droppings.
Ahhh, the joy of my job.

It just makes a record deal seem that much sweeter.

T.G.I.F.

~BnR

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