It never fails when I have plans, that gremlin shows it’s ugly head and causes trouble and it’s always at 4pm.  My work day begins at 7:30 am and ends at 4:15 pm.  I stay busy throughout the day doing preventive maintenance, too hot/too cold calls, some plumbing issues and general everyday maintenance issues.  In a company that houses some 3,000 employees, most everyone knows the hours that we work but they always wait until 4 pm to call and tell us that they have an emergency that needs to be taken care of right away.

A few months ago I got the call at 4pm which stated that the person had water dripping from the ceiling.  I get to the call and of course there’s water dripping from the ceiling.  I asked the guy who made the call how long had it been leaking. I almost lost it when he told me that it had been leaking since before 10 am that morning.  Why did you wait until 4pm to make the call to maintenance and he told me that he knew that we left at 4pm and he decided that he’d better call before we left.

Most of the 4pm calls are not calls that only last a few minutes and your done.  Oh no, these calls can last from 3 hours to 10 hours to several days.  The one I got today involved water under the floor in our computer room.  Never a good thing to have water underneath a raised floor.  Once we found out where the water was coming from it took us several hours just to vacuum all the water up.  Needless to say that I did not get to ride any today.

“Life Goes On!”