I fix A/C?

Our A/C went off yesterday due to a brief power outage. I duly reported it in the prescribed manner (an email to the facilities manager, his assistant, and my supervisor), thinking someone would be out yesterday afternoon to start it back up again. No dice.

Sent another email early this morning, this time marking it urgent. Nothing.

Finally, about an hour before we were due to open, I frantically called the facilities manager, who said he had not seen either of my emails. He promised to call the city buildings people to get someone out here, but he couldn't say when they would arrive. He had no explanation as to why nobody else who had also received my emails had done anything about the situation.

We tried to wait patiently for someone to get here to fix it. Right before we were supposed to open, there was still nobody here to work on the A/C. It was still stiflingly hot (84 degrees) in the building, so I made a desperate call to my boss, who finally agreed (after some pleading on my part) to let us delay opening for an hour.

There was a crowd of people at the door waiting to get in, so a staff member went out to put up signs and explain what was going on. She was stopped by a guy in an A/C repair uniform who handed her his card and, in halting English, said "I fix A/C?" Thinking this is the repair guy from the city, she brought him to me. Now I don't speak Spanish, but luckily we have a staff member who does, so she was brought in to interpret. Turns out he was just an enterprising soul trying to drum up some business! I can just imagine me letting him at our A/C unit and him charging us hundreds for fixing it. I'd have been fired, I think.

Finally the city people showed up just before we were supposed to open and FLIPPED A BREAKER to get the A/C restarted. I asked them to show me where this breaker was (I had already been up there and could not figure it out) but they refused, insisting that we are not authorized to TOUCH anything on the A/C units.

So this is almost guaranteed to happen again. I hate having to deal with building problems, and we have plenty of 'em, I can tell you. But I'll leave that for another post.