workingfortheman.com

Building management comes down to one thing: Overflowing toilets.

If you walk down the hall at your office and see a light out, you don't give it a second thought. If one of the elevators in your building isn't working, you just get annoyed that you have to wait an extra 30 seconds for the elevator that does work. If you see that someone has spilled their coffee near the front door of your office, you're just glad you've still got yours in your hand. But if you see that a toilet is overflowing in the bathroom, you make sure to tell the receptionist that she needs to call maintenance. And calling maintenance means calling the building management office. You may not even realize that the building you work in is managed, either because it's so junky and full of things that don't work that no one could possibly be managing it, or it's so clean and in good working order that you simply don't think about the building at all.

But rest assured, your office building is managed, most likely by a large company which manages numerous buildings throughout the city, and possibly even the country. There's a whole army of workers out there involved in building management.

I unfortunately spent six long months on the front lines of building management, taking those "overflowing toilet" phone calls that seemed to stream in from every corner of every floor in the building all day long. My entry into the world of building management was no deliberate choice on my part. My temp agency assigned me the six-month gig, which I desperately needed to due severely depleted personal funds. I felt lucky to get such a lengthy assignment. The building I helped "manage" was a beautiful 18-story waterfront property with a giant sculpture in the lobby, as well as several paintings priced at about $30,000 each. I'm not sure how much the sculpture cost, but I know how much the paintings were because I processed the invoices.

I worked in a two person office. There was the building manager, and me. We had one day-porter, a security guard, and two building engineers. The building management team was cool. Very cool. I had no complaints about the people I worked with.

I remember rapping with the Mike, the chief engineer, one morning, and he told about his days as an engineer on the swing shift at a plush downtown hotel. He said famous rock bands would stay there all the time, because the local concert promoter put up all his bands at this hotel. Mike would get to meet the band, he said, because he would go to the hotel phone room and disconnect their phone. Within minutes, the front desk would call him and explain that a phone wasn't working in whatever room the rock band was staying in. Mike would go up to the room to "check out the phone." Once in the room, he'd take a quick look at the phone, and then say that the problem must be in the phone room. Then he'd quickly run down to the phone room, re-connect the line, and go back upstairs to tell the band everything should be okay. One of the band members would check the now working phone, and Mike would then be celebrated as a hero. There were these famous people band stories, as well as stories of naked women answering the door... But I definitely believe the famous band stories.

So the people who I worked with were cool. But the people who I worked for, they were the worst. Every company has a liaison - a facility manager - to the building management company. Some facility managers you never hear from. We like those people. But others you hear from several times a day. We really, really hate those people. And those are essentially the people I worked for. In addition to over flowing toilets, which is perhaps the most common type of call we received, here's a sampling of other frequent requests: Temperature - either too hot or too cold; ceiling lights out; lost or forgotten keys; juice/coffee spills; deliveries through the loading dock. These items seem trivial, and not worth bitching and moaning about. I'd agree, but the sheer number of calls for each item every single day is enough to drive the most patient old lady who bakes bread for the mailman over the edge. One woman on the sixteenth floor, Marianne, would call up to five times a day complaining about the temperature in her office. Now in nice buildings like this, temperature control can get pretty specific. But it does have its limitations. Marianne did not understand this concept. If it was hot outside and the air conditioning was operating, she'd be too cold. If it was cold outside and the heat was working, she'd be too hot. And she didn't hesitate to call and ask for one of the engineers to come up to her office to try and fix the situation. The catch here is that no one else in Marianne's office was complaining. Everyone else was just fine and dandy. So if Mike would make an adjustment for Marianne, everyone else would complain about the temperature. This is the crux that Marianne never seemed to understand, hence the phone calls.

One time the facilities manager for an advertising agency called and said there was a backpack in their bathroom, and no one is sure who the backpack belongs to. He wanted the security guard to come and check it out, because it might be a bomb. Keep in mind that our security guard makes about $8 an hour. Like he's going to be the one who volunteers to protect the ad agency from a potential bomb. Right. Another facilities manager, Javier, would often call and complain about things that only affected him. For example, one time someone had spilled the remnants of a hole punching job near his cubicle. This sort of mess would normally be taken care of by the night janitorial crew. But Javier wanted the mess cleaned up right away. "I just can't get any work done with the hole punches everywhere. Could you send someone up to vacuum them right away?" What a fucking asshole.

One guy from the 5th floor would call me up at twice a day, and before he identified himself, I'd say, "What's up Marvin."

"How'd you know it was me?" he'd ask, genuinely surprised. Every time. It was ridiculous. "Because Marvin," I'd say as my eyes rolled back to where my head was in 1975, "I recognize your voice." A receptionist, Jackie, who wasn't a facilities person but felt comfortable enough to call the building management office directly, would often complain about being too cold. She was on a floor with over 100 people, all of them enjoying the cool air. Jackie, you see, wore skimpy skirts and shirts held up by straps. We finally just told her to put on a jacket. It should be noted that building management isn't just about coffee spills and chilly office temperatures. A building is constantly undergoing change - a new picture here, a wall taken out there, a kitchen sink replaced, new carpet laid. In addition to all this change to the building itself, people come and people go, some are transferred, others are fired, some just quit because they can't take it anymore. Building management is involved in all this change.

One woman, Fran, was the facilities manager for five floors of the 18 story building. She had an annual budget specifically set up for "tenant improvements," so she was always having contractors bid for jobs - everything from carpet replacement to making a large office into a bunch of smaller offices. These kinds of "improvements" needed the approval of building management, and the building manager was intricately involved with each step of the process. But Fran could never keep her appointments with contractors straight, and always lost the quotes contractors took their precious time to calculate and submit. She was a total bozo, and every time you talked to her, which was a lot, you wondered how she ever got the job of facilities manager.

Perhaps the ugliest part of building management is keeping the unwanteds out. I'm not talking about the homeless. I'm talking about disgruntled employees, those who have been downsized, let go or fired. Given the occasional news report about a disgruntled employee who shoots up his boss and co-workers, companies have begun to treat all former employees who don't leave for greener pastures as potential gun-wielding nutcases. This means lock changes and a picture of the former employee at the front desk, at the minimum. Usually, building management knows about the firing of an employee before the person being fired or anyone in his office knows. It's a very Cloak and Dagger-like experience, usually beginning with the facilities manager calling up and whispering, "Can I come down to see you about an internal matter here." The facilities manager then comes down to explain the situation, usually speaking in tones similar to the muffled conversation at a wake. "You know, I really like Rob, and I don't want to see him go, and I don't think he's going to do anything crazy, but the company comes first. You have to think of the company."

It's a safe bet to avoid any profession that includes the word "management" in its title. But in the case of building management, if you find yourself steering your professional life in that direction, just think of stopped-up toilets. That should be enough to get you off the course and into something else.

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