They Needed Routine Approvals To Keep Things Moving, But Constant Delays From Leadership Pushed The Team To Start Bypassing The Normal Process
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Some companies refuse to pay for maintenance until the problem reaches the people in charge.
At one office building, purchasing regularly denied repair requests while the maintenance team fought for basic fixes.
That changed whenever a hidden valve made the executive floor suddenly too hot or cold.
Check out how quickly decisions got made.
No heat for you
Back when I was a field tech, one of my customers was in a tall office building.
The Purchasing Dept. was often super stingy approving maintenance and custodial quotes.
It was always a fight.
Management has a talent of putting off necessary fixes until the last minute.
There was some repair work being done on the HVAC (Heating/Cooling) system and one of the maintenance personnel asked the contractors to add a couple of extra shutoff valves leading to the executive floor.
Whenever Purchasing would deny an HVAC maintenance request, one of the support staff would go into a crawlspace and throttle the ball valve to the executive loop back by about 60%.
That’s one way to speed up the approval process.
This would restrict the flow just enough to make the executive floor too cold or too hot.
When one of the big wigs would complain, maintenance would just reply with: “Well, we need a new bearing assembly (or whatever). We put a quote in last week and we just are waiting for purchasing to approve it. But I’ll see what I can do today.”
Gaslighting at its finest.
An hour or so later, the quote would be approved and a few hours after that, the valve would be opened back to almost full.
Then opened completely when the new whatever arrived.
Many disagreed on how the story was told, but valued the premise.
And agreed that this kind of problem was far too commonplace.
Some wondered if the trick could work elsewhere.
One person was appalled.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about customer who won’t take no for an answer when it comes to outdated price-matching policies.
And another reiterated the lesson of the story.
Whenever purchasing delayed an HVAC repair, maintenance quietly reduced the heating or cooling going to the executive floor.
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Once an executive complained, the repair quote was quickly approved and the valve was opened again.
Purchasing kept freezing the repair budget until maintenance returned the favor upstairs.
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