Woe the building

I work in a building that's less than 4 years old. In spite of its youth, we have constant problems with the building. Sometimes it seems like it's falling down around our ears.

Our A/C (which I blogged about in a recent post) goes out every time we have a power outage, which seems to be at least once or twice a month. It usually takes an entire day to get it fixed, and since my library is in a very warm part of the country, we have to endure 85+ conditions for way too long. It's been the bane of my existence this summer.

Our outside lights frequently don't work at all. When we leave at closing time, it is often completely dark. Repair personnel have come out more than once to "fix" it but it keeps getting unfixed somehow. We have taken to carrying flashlights with us when we leave.

There's always something wrong in our public restrooms. Seems like there's always a customer screaming at us because the automatic faucets don't work or the toilets flush too fast. (And don't even get me started on the day someone left a "gift" for us on the floor in the men's restroom. Gross.)

Our floor covering is carpet tiles, which shouldn't be a problem except the chairs that were purchased for the computers are very heavy, solid oak chairs that dig in between the tiles and pull them up ALL THE TIME. Why didn't they purchase chairs that would slide easily over the carpet tiles? It drives us nuts and of course is a tripping hazard. City repair people re-glue the tiles but of course they get pulled up again, over and over and over. I report at least three loose carpet tiles every month.

We discovered a few weeks ago that the brick facing on the outside of the building was coming loose. The builders failed to properly secure the bricks so now a whole section is sagging away from the structure. It looks pretty bad. They are supposed to repair it but who knows when they will get around to it.

Let's see...what else? We had raw sewage back up into our public restrooms the other day due to some work that was being done on our outside sewer drain. That was fun.

You would think in a building this new we wouldn't have all these issues. That's what you get when you go with the lowest bidder. Sigh...