We generally like our apartment, but the lift in our building is utter crap. It’s slow at the best of times, and it’s been incredibly unreliable since we moved in. We’ve taken to keeping track of outages in our shared calendar, and have a steady stream of often increasingly irritated iMessages between us and the building manager.
Lift engineers – from two different firms – have been out countless times. Each time they’re reasonably prompt, and each time they leave the lift “works” again. Sometimes for hours, sometimes for days – it even went a few weeks between failures during the height of lockdown when no one was using it.
It’s possible all they’ve done is hit it with a hammer.
They keep saying “engineering.” I don’ think it means what they think it means.
Today it went out of service with Dawnise in it on her way out to the grocery store. Fortunately she was able to convince the doors to open. The lift had made it to the 5th floor – one whole floor down – and thought it was on 2.
The lift “engineer”‘s prognosis was “I think the drive is dead.” I’m no lift engineer, so I’m not sure what that means, but I expect it means this will be a prolonged outage while the they who are involved in these things argue about costs, try to source a second hand part, or bodge the clearly broken one back together, maybe find someone to replace it at a discount, and generally treat the whole thing as “someone else’s problem.”
In this case, I’m the someone else. And I’m well past sick of this problem.
A few months after we arrived we were watching a bit of standup comedy on “telly.” The comic, who’s name I forget, was a Canadian who’d lived in the UK for a decade or so. He summarized the situation as “nothing in this country actually works, and that doesn’t seem to bother anyone.”
When we were done laughing we looked at each-other and realized it was funny ’cause it was true – and since hearing it put that way, his punch line has become a regular in our daily conversation.
“Nothing in this country actually works, and that doesn’t seem to bother anyone.”
Try it. There’s a good chance it applies to whatever the country you live in, too.