We're taking a bit of a breather while the world rearranges its underpants. Meanwhile, the other blog is here.

Wednesday, June 02, 2010

I did what I could with me gas mask

It's a nice warm sunny day in Helminthdale so of course the air conditioning isn't working. The heating, however, is. We have a maintenance contract for the heating but not the air conditioning. We didn't used to have a heating contract but about a decade ago there was an incident involving T.Aldous, Reggie Clockwatcher and a sulking match and the union had to step in to point out the terms of the shops acts. So we have a heating maintenance contract. The acts don't stipulate a legal highermost temperature so we don't have to have an air conditioning maintenance contract. We have on occasion been able to invoke the Health & Safety at Work Act to get temporary palliatives (this usually involved T.Aldous sending Maisie out to buy fans out of petty cash) but no actual solution. Which is one of the reasons why this open-plan office sounds like the consumptives' ward in a Victorian hospital.

As it happens, the heating engineer was over this morning to check the filters. He noticed it was a bit warm and stuffy so he rang the air-conditioning company to ask how to fix the problem. After a few minutes' worth of conversation the engineer passed the 'phone over to Seth.

"Here, you have a go, I can't make head nor tail of it."

"Well," protested Seth, "if you can't make head nor tail of it what makes you think I'll do any better."

"I'm the heating engineer, I've no idea how your air-con plant works."

Anyway, between them they seem to have had a go at something. The air's no cooler but it feels a little less stale now.

2 comments:

Pat said...

Could you open a window - or are they nailed down?

Kevin Musgrove said...

Pat: I swear I am not making this up: we're not allowed to open the windows because "it upsets the balance of the air-conditioning."