So I was changing lightbulbs on floor
26, which is entirely taken up by offices of the
Washington State
Court of Appeals, whose court is on the lobby floor. It had
apparently been a while since they had been graced by the presence
of a lighting maintence technician, since I was seeing a ton of
light bulbs, and people kept leaving post-it notes on my clipboard,
asking me to change some particular fixture. I'm doing the whole
floor, guys, you don't have to draw my attention to every single
fixture with a dead bulb.
When but should we recieve an annoucement over the security
intercom that PSE had experienced a
series of transformer failures, and that we urgently needed to
reduce power consumption by 40% or suffer a brownout. To wit: we
would shut off all the lights. (Except for the emergency lights,
which cannot be shut off, except via axe.)
Now, you would think that I, being a lighting maintence guy, and
thus not an actual electrician, would have no duty to play in the
"shutting off lights" phase, and, as a corrolary, would not be able
to fufill my normal duties, since changing lights is hard if you
have no way to determine which ones are dead. You would be wrong,
because as a Union Square employee, I
did have a valuable
role to play in the "intimidating tennants" phase.
You see, the lights are shut off through the building automation
system, which turns the lights on in the morning and turns them off
at night. For the purposes of working late, an
override
switch is provided, to override the automatic shutoff and keep
the lights on.
But this switch harbors a sinister secret, for it not only
overrides the timers, but
all commands from the management
computer; say, if it was attempting to shut off the lights to
prevent a brownout.
My job was thus: Track down these people, and gently point out that
we had a contractual obligation to the city of seattle to
shed load, and
if they kept overriding management commands, we would unfortunately
be forced to shut down all power to the floor; which included power
to computers, critical servers, life-support machines, (also known
as "coffee machines") etc.
This had the unfortunate side-effect of making me feel like a
jackbooted thug.
After properly browbeating the offending tennats, I proceded to the
One Union engineering office, where Don Wildes[*] and Mitchell
(coming to us live by speakerphone) were manning the building
management computer. I fielded calls on Don's phone while he
resoved some alerts, then we proceded to 17 to clear a taped
override switch.
*: My immediate supervisor for the filter changing and relief fan
maintence project of 12/2007-03/2008.
Now, to me, the procedure to clear a taped override switch[**]
is:
1. Remove the tape.
2. Leave.
But Don switched it up, and added a third item:
3. Stick around and tell the tennant how walking into their suite
and shutting off their lights is good for them.
**: If you tape an override switch in the "on" position, then it'll
constantly increment the timeout counter, and the lights will, as a
result, never turn off. This is a fairly bad idea, since it means
that the
lights will never turn off, and thus, you know,
remain on. So, removing the tape benefitted the tennant in
three ways: It prevented a brownout, it saved them money on their
power bill, and it saved them money on lamp replacement
costs.
The person closest to the door took this as an oppratunity to point
out that it was dark, that he didn't like it being so dark, and
that he would rather it be brighter. At one point in his
increasingly hostile rant he speculated that it "was bad
engineering" for there not to be one light fixture per office. He,
of course, couldn't know this, but Don is an Operating Engineer,
and this is more or less a direct insult.
Don, remaining remarkably calm, replied that he should contact the
architects who designed the building in 1982, and express his
concerns to them, rather than the two people with the least
possible ability to affect the situation. In response, he told Don
that he was "tired of your sanctimonious shit", and told us to
leave, which we did.
Nothing much of interest happened after that. The "crisis" ended a
couple of hours later, just as I was leaving, and Mark got to turn
all the lights back on. EXCITING