Fatalities Management
Well that's what we used to call Facilities Management where I used to work, it was an on going battle, such as finding fire doors propped open with a door stop (done by lifting the floor panel and rototating it). Whenever I found this I would put it back, as the eletrical room was next along the corridor and our offices the other side, eventually I got hauled up by FM and told to leave it alone, I pointed out it was a fire door, they said due to fact they'd move the UPS batteries outside to a new building it was no longer a fire door. I suggested they remove the label saying it was. I'm sure it never happened.
Next up was the firemans breaker switch on the building panel in the hallway, I pointed out it was the wrong colour (red) denoting an alarm break box rather than a power break box (yellow I think), again they did nothing about it, lo and behold one weekend when we were doing a massive upgrade and had the whole department in, the majority of which were contractors and costing a fortune, FM decided to test the alarm boxes, it was annoying enough having the fire alarm going off every few minutes, until CLUNK, no power, even the computer room which had a UPS was off, work stopped and everyone started to panic as we had tight deadlines to deliver our upgrade.
The only light bulb working was the one in my head, I knew pretty much instantly what they had done, they had opened the red box on the building control panel (depsite being labeled firemans breaker) and cut the power, hence why the UPS wasn't working.
No issue just power it back up. Oh that's odd where has all the kit gone from the room where we were shown it was and trained to use. Ah, FM built a new building outside and moved everything, which is why it turned out we had a special film on our windows now in case of an explosion and why the fire door was no longer a fire door.
FM had no idea where anything was in the new building or how to use it.So I had to go through all the building outside with the head of FM who had not a scrap of paperwork. Eventually I found the breaker I remembered from training hidden in a false panel at the bottom of the eletrical cab but the head of FM wasn't prepared to throw it so I had to do it.
I pointed out he really should ensure the breaker box was changed as per my request, he had plans of the 'new' electrics, instructions on how to use them and that he needed to retrain the operations team. Doubt it ever happened.
Funny thing was I was working for a major power company at the time and our building was constantly short of power. We had frequent requests to power off kit until they eventually added an extra supply.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
