A Watched Pot Never Boils
Hello World,
Just when you think that October is going to go on forever, and nothing interesting is ever going to happen, suddenly the breaking news starts breaking out all over the place, until it seems that everything that can break has already broken. Well, I hate to be the one to break this to everyone, but we won't have the temporary boiler house at the hospital to kick around anymore. Alert readers may recall that it made its first appearance on the scene in October 2001, when the temporary boilers were deposited in the employee courtyard, and then a whole plywood structure was erected around them, measuring an imposing 16-feet high and 36-feet square, and painted barn red, making it a ghastly eyesore of epic proportions, that surprised even long-time employees. Then they surrounded it with a tall chain-link fence, and wove green plastic bush-like fronds through the links, one supposes on the theory that it would be more decorative, which in fact only made it look even more slovenly and menacing, as hard as that might seem to believe. Fortunately, the fence installers came and repossessed their ugly fence when the hospital failed to pay their bill in a timely fashion (when it comes to paying bills, the hospital subscribes to the policy of being fashionably late –– say, a year or so –– which is remarkably unpopular among our vendors) so after that, we only had to look at the unsightly boiler house, rather than the combination of the hulking red boiler house and the prickly green fence together. Not that it was much of an improvement in the looks department, but after all (they kept telling us) it's only temporary, so we should just stop squawking and get over it already.
It was just shy of a full nine years later –– and certainly not as "temporary" as we might have supposed originally –– that the original exterior was entirely dismantled, and replaced with all new plywood earlier this year in April, and then covered in what appeared to be brick-red paneling all over. At that point, we all just assumed that the temporary boiler house would be with us forever, now that it had already been here ten years, plus had its own renovation project on top of that, and the "temporary" part of the temporary boiler house was just a figment of our imagination, based on a hopeful naivete in spite of the cold hard facts that were staring us right in the face. At least they didn't put up another ugly fence, so we were content to be grateful for small favors, and just learn to love the temporary boiler house in all its apparently permanent glory, however grotesque that might be.
Well, for all of you fans of the grotesque, please step right up, because what happened next was classic theater, that is, if the Theater of Grand Guignol is your style. I wasn't at work on Monday, but apparently all day long, people were complaining about a funny smell and smoke coming out of the boiler house, although it seemed that no one in charge was paying it any mind. Suddenly at 5:30 PM, the structure erupted in flames, and I've been told that the video clips of it have been posted all over the Internet and are extremely entertaining, so please feel free to check it out for yourselves. The fire department raced over and did an admirable job of keeping the boilers from exploding, and even prevented the old rattle-trap of a flea-bag building where I work from burning down, although it did break a bunch of windows. Luckily at that hour, most of the employees were out of the building, away from the courtyard, and safely on their way home, so a full-scale evacuation wasn't necessary. The conflagration wasn't close enough to the main hospital building to pose any real danger to the patients, and the smoke compartment doors worked properly to keep the ash and fumes from becoming an indoor problem. Because the boiler house was a stand-alone structure, it was able to burn down without impacting any other buildings, and the only other casualties of the event were the benches in the courtyard, as well as the unfortunate new smoking shelter, which was in the unenviable position of backing up against the boiler house, which probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but not the way things turned out later.
I came in to work on Tuesday morning to find that the courtyard had been roped off, and we all had to get into our building from a different route. When I looked out the window, I found the smoldering wreckage of what used to be the boiler house –– loose charred remnants of plywood, blackened pipes, melted tubes and sooty wads of debris –– already being carted away by an industrious cleaning crew working at a furious pace. Nothing was left of the house itself, and just the collapsed boilers and some of the larger pipes were still in place, and looking pitifully forlorn and unkempt in the cold hard light of day. In our old flea-bitten hovel, we thanked our lucky stars that we didn't come in to find the building burnt right out from under us, and years worth of documents burned up with it, thanks not, and instead resigned ourselves to a long cold winter before they ever replaced the boilers or cared if we had heat or hot water around here. So it came as a big surprise –– and here, "bombshell" would not be too strong a word –– when a new temporary boiler was delivered that very afternoon, and even though it wouldn't fit in the courtyard with the other two boilers already there, they still managed to hook it up from where it was, and give us all the heat and hot water anyone could possibly want, which was especially welcome under the circumstances. It's true this was a disaster for the temporary boiler house, but everyone kept saying over and over that it could have been so much worse, so we had much to be thankful for. They did open up the courtyard again, but it's just not the same without the temporary boiler house that we all loved to hate, and we certainly won't have that to kick around anymore. Somewhere, a tall prickly green fence is having the last laugh.
Of course, it wouldn't be hospital management if they didn't send out a memo after the event, and this was up to their usual standards, which is to say, alternately incomprehensible and inadvertently funny, especially with this opening salvo:
=========================
As many of you know this Monday we experienced an unfortunate fire. In the early afternoon, employees alerted engineering staff to an odor. Engineering determined the issue was in the boiler building and put in an emergency call to our boiler maintenance company. Upon arrival, the outside maintenance engineers determined that a component of the boiler was excessively "hot" and the boiler was immediately shut down. Even with quick action, the overheated boilers erupted into flames around 5:30pm. The fire alarms were pulled; the emergency management team was called into action alerting staff, patients and visitors of this situation. The New Rochelle Fire Department quickly responded and had the fire extinguished within 20 minutes. =============================
Now, my personal feeling is that there's no point in that whole first paragraph detailing all the things that were done to keep the situation under control, if they were all just going to stand around and watch the thing burn to the ground anyway, and take the ill-fated smoking shelter right along with it. Of course, this is why I'm nothing but an obscure and low-paid underling, and not the high-priced CEO of a middling community hospital, where it takes them all day, and scores of people, to baby-sit a smoking boiler that burns down right in front of their faces in spite of it all. And if you had to send out a memo to thank the fire department, and acknowledge the employees who remained calm and professional throughout, I certainly wouldn't showcase the management's ineptitude by enumerating all the things that didn't work, as if it was some proud accomplishment worth sharing, for heaven's sake. In the immortal words of the legendary Branch Rickey, "We could have done that without you, Ralph."
In other news, I was shooting the breeze with a colleague that I know from work, and she was waxing poetic in a wistful way about how she wished that she could ditch it all and go live like a beach bum in some island paradise, except as she pointed out, she would never be able to afford her cell phone plan that way. I said that we couldn't do that, because Bill wouldn't want to be without his cable channels, which must have struck a nerve, because she suddenly launched into a diatribe about all of the couch potatoes in her life, sitting around and doing nothing but watching television every waking moment, and she was plenty sick and tired of it, I can tell you that. I said that I wouldn't complain about Bill enjoying his TV shows, not only because he is a prince among men, but because he does the bulk of the heavy lifting around the house –– doing all of the cooking and cleaning and grocery shopping, as well as cutting the grass, without fanfare or complaint, year in and year out. She thought about that for a moment, and then asked me very plainly, "So what do YOU do?" I explained to her that I'm the brains of the operation, but even as someone who is basically a total stranger, even she could tell that couldn't possibly be true, and she would be right. So one day last week when I was at home and Bill was out, he came back to find that I had washed the dishes and cleaned the bathroom in his absence. Fortunately, the paramedics responded promptly when he went into cardiac arrest, and disaster was narrowly averted. I was going to send out a memo, but first I have to settle this argument between Branch Rickey and the prickly green fence over who gets the last laugh, Ralph.
Elle
Just when you think that October is going to go on forever, and nothing interesting is ever going to happen, suddenly the breaking news starts breaking out all over the place, until it seems that everything that can break has already broken. Well, I hate to be the one to break this to everyone, but we won't have the temporary boiler house at the hospital to kick around anymore. Alert readers may recall that it made its first appearance on the scene in October 2001, when the temporary boilers were deposited in the employee courtyard, and then a whole plywood structure was erected around them, measuring an imposing 16-feet high and 36-feet square, and painted barn red, making it a ghastly eyesore of epic proportions, that surprised even long-time employees. Then they surrounded it with a tall chain-link fence, and wove green plastic bush-like fronds through the links, one supposes on the theory that it would be more decorative, which in fact only made it look even more slovenly and menacing, as hard as that might seem to believe. Fortunately, the fence installers came and repossessed their ugly fence when the hospital failed to pay their bill in a timely fashion (when it comes to paying bills, the hospital subscribes to the policy of being fashionably late –– say, a year or so –– which is remarkably unpopular among our vendors) so after that, we only had to look at the unsightly boiler house, rather than the combination of the hulking red boiler house and the prickly green fence together. Not that it was much of an improvement in the looks department, but after all (they kept telling us) it's only temporary, so we should just stop squawking and get over it already.
It was just shy of a full nine years later –– and certainly not as "temporary" as we might have supposed originally –– that the original exterior was entirely dismantled, and replaced with all new plywood earlier this year in April, and then covered in what appeared to be brick-red paneling all over. At that point, we all just assumed that the temporary boiler house would be with us forever, now that it had already been here ten years, plus had its own renovation project on top of that, and the "temporary" part of the temporary boiler house was just a figment of our imagination, based on a hopeful naivete in spite of the cold hard facts that were staring us right in the face. At least they didn't put up another ugly fence, so we were content to be grateful for small favors, and just learn to love the temporary boiler house in all its apparently permanent glory, however grotesque that might be.
Well, for all of you fans of the grotesque, please step right up, because what happened next was classic theater, that is, if the Theater of Grand Guignol is your style. I wasn't at work on Monday, but apparently all day long, people were complaining about a funny smell and smoke coming out of the boiler house, although it seemed that no one in charge was paying it any mind. Suddenly at 5:30 PM, the structure erupted in flames, and I've been told that the video clips of it have been posted all over the Internet and are extremely entertaining, so please feel free to check it out for yourselves. The fire department raced over and did an admirable job of keeping the boilers from exploding, and even prevented the old rattle-trap of a flea-bag building where I work from burning down, although it did break a bunch of windows. Luckily at that hour, most of the employees were out of the building, away from the courtyard, and safely on their way home, so a full-scale evacuation wasn't necessary. The conflagration wasn't close enough to the main hospital building to pose any real danger to the patients, and the smoke compartment doors worked properly to keep the ash and fumes from becoming an indoor problem. Because the boiler house was a stand-alone structure, it was able to burn down without impacting any other buildings, and the only other casualties of the event were the benches in the courtyard, as well as the unfortunate new smoking shelter, which was in the unenviable position of backing up against the boiler house, which probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but not the way things turned out later.
I came in to work on Tuesday morning to find that the courtyard had been roped off, and we all had to get into our building from a different route. When I looked out the window, I found the smoldering wreckage of what used to be the boiler house –– loose charred remnants of plywood, blackened pipes, melted tubes and sooty wads of debris –– already being carted away by an industrious cleaning crew working at a furious pace. Nothing was left of the house itself, and just the collapsed boilers and some of the larger pipes were still in place, and looking pitifully forlorn and unkempt in the cold hard light of day. In our old flea-bitten hovel, we thanked our lucky stars that we didn't come in to find the building burnt right out from under us, and years worth of documents burned up with it, thanks not, and instead resigned ourselves to a long cold winter before they ever replaced the boilers or cared if we had heat or hot water around here. So it came as a big surprise –– and here, "bombshell" would not be too strong a word –– when a new temporary boiler was delivered that very afternoon, and even though it wouldn't fit in the courtyard with the other two boilers already there, they still managed to hook it up from where it was, and give us all the heat and hot water anyone could possibly want, which was especially welcome under the circumstances. It's true this was a disaster for the temporary boiler house, but everyone kept saying over and over that it could have been so much worse, so we had much to be thankful for. They did open up the courtyard again, but it's just not the same without the temporary boiler house that we all loved to hate, and we certainly won't have that to kick around anymore. Somewhere, a tall prickly green fence is having the last laugh.
Of course, it wouldn't be hospital management if they didn't send out a memo after the event, and this was up to their usual standards, which is to say, alternately incomprehensible and inadvertently funny, especially with this opening salvo:
=========================
As many of you know this Monday we experienced an unfortunate fire. In the early afternoon, employees alerted engineering staff to an odor. Engineering determined the issue was in the boiler building and put in an emergency call to our boiler maintenance company. Upon arrival, the outside maintenance engineers determined that a component of the boiler was excessively "hot" and the boiler was immediately shut down. Even with quick action, the overheated boilers erupted into flames around 5:30pm. The fire alarms were pulled; the emergency management team was called into action alerting staff, patients and visitors of this situation. The New Rochelle Fire Department quickly responded and had the fire extinguished within 20 minutes. =============================
Now, my personal feeling is that there's no point in that whole first paragraph detailing all the things that were done to keep the situation under control, if they were all just going to stand around and watch the thing burn to the ground anyway, and take the ill-fated smoking shelter right along with it. Of course, this is why I'm nothing but an obscure and low-paid underling, and not the high-priced CEO of a middling community hospital, where it takes them all day, and scores of people, to baby-sit a smoking boiler that burns down right in front of their faces in spite of it all. And if you had to send out a memo to thank the fire department, and acknowledge the employees who remained calm and professional throughout, I certainly wouldn't showcase the management's ineptitude by enumerating all the things that didn't work, as if it was some proud accomplishment worth sharing, for heaven's sake. In the immortal words of the legendary Branch Rickey, "We could have done that without you, Ralph."
In other news, I was shooting the breeze with a colleague that I know from work, and she was waxing poetic in a wistful way about how she wished that she could ditch it all and go live like a beach bum in some island paradise, except as she pointed out, she would never be able to afford her cell phone plan that way. I said that we couldn't do that, because Bill wouldn't want to be without his cable channels, which must have struck a nerve, because she suddenly launched into a diatribe about all of the couch potatoes in her life, sitting around and doing nothing but watching television every waking moment, and she was plenty sick and tired of it, I can tell you that. I said that I wouldn't complain about Bill enjoying his TV shows, not only because he is a prince among men, but because he does the bulk of the heavy lifting around the house –– doing all of the cooking and cleaning and grocery shopping, as well as cutting the grass, without fanfare or complaint, year in and year out. She thought about that for a moment, and then asked me very plainly, "So what do YOU do?" I explained to her that I'm the brains of the operation, but even as someone who is basically a total stranger, even she could tell that couldn't possibly be true, and she would be right. So one day last week when I was at home and Bill was out, he came back to find that I had washed the dishes and cleaned the bathroom in his absence. Fortunately, the paramedics responded promptly when he went into cardiac arrest, and disaster was narrowly averted. I was going to send out a memo, but first I have to settle this argument between Branch Rickey and the prickly green fence over who gets the last laugh, Ralph.
Elle
posted by El Tango Fandango @ 9:32 PM
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