Problem Solving 101 – (6/365/2023)

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This photo is not a good photo, or an interesting photo, but it does have an amusing story.

There has been a water dispenser in the kitchen of the 13th floor at my downtown office building. I have used both the hot and cold water sides to fill my water bottle or make tea probably thousands of times in my years there.

During COVID office closures, the kitchen was renovated, a new fridge and microwave were installed, an existing coffee maker and toaster oven retained….and the water dispenser retained.

I haven’t worked form the office in 3 years; my home base is now the nearby hatchery, but I’ve been in a few times for this or that reason, so I knew the kitchen had been renovated.

This past week I worked from the downtown office for the first time in three years. I’m not going back there permanently, just a couple of days a week because there is a new staff member that I want to ensure has a teammate nearby at least a couple of days as he learns the program.

Wednesday I took some tea and a tea mug and went to the kitchen to make tea….but the water dispenser didn’t work. I noticed a single electric water kettle and thought to myself…”wow, one tea kettle to service 70+ people on the floor, that’s a bit challenging…” So I turned the kettle on and left my mug next to it so others would leave me some water in case the water boiled before I returned.

I did the same yesterday.

Today there were only two of us on this side of the floor, I think there were only two others on the entire floor, and I was in earlier than anyone.

When I went to start the kettle the problem solver in me kicked in…the “why won’t it work” part of my brain. I have always been a “What happens when I do …THIS?” sort of person. I’ve never stopped being willing to try something so long as it seems that I shouldn’t make it worse in the process…which doesn’t always hold true. I learn to fix a lot of things because I have screwed a lot of things up by pushing buttons I shouldn’t have….but I also fix a lot of things too.

I looked to over, and then spun the entire cooler around. I’d like to say that having a long history of playing with plumbing related to fish culture helped me….and maybe it did, but in all honesty I feel like anyone with half a brain should have seen what I saw.

I was just looking for a switch to flip. I could see that it was plugged in, but the coils on the back were room temperature, and obviously not functioning.

There was a copper water line running from the wall to the back of the dispenser, it looked intact. I followed it up the back of the dispenser and saw that it was intersected by a small 1 inch turn valve in the water line.

Perpendicular is the equivalent of “off”….parallel is in line and means “on”

Take a wild guess as to which way the valve was set.

I turned the valve and heard water flood into the chamber and it gurgled to life.

Seriously?

People returned to work in May…..this thing has been sitting there non-functional since then…because no one thought to turn it on, because no one thought to investigate why it wasn’t producing water?

I thought to myself….”There must be a reason….maybe the water line is cracked and it was leaking so it was turned off…?”

“Except wouldn’t it have a sign on it then? Or wouldn’t it have been disconnected?”

I came back to it several times over the course of the day to see if it was leaking and creating a puddle.

Nope.

For about eight months, people have been lining their cups up to wait for a little kettle, that has a volume of about 1.5L, to boil….while a large water dispenser with a boiler built in sits idle…..because no one discovered that they could turn it on by spinning a small valve on the back.

People have probably walked in, pushed the levers, not received any water, and thought something along the lines of the following…”Oh, it still doesn’t work“….”I guess they are still working on it“…”I wish they would get that fixed“….. and telling others that “Oh, yeah, that hasn’t worked in ages” (I know this last one to be true because someone I didn’t know from another part of the floor told me just that).

But no one assumed responsibility to get it working?

And I wonder why people make fun of government office workers.

I sort of wonder how long it will be before anyone realizes that it now works…….Probably not terribly long since I shared the humour with two people by email and they will probably use it on Monday…and others will be like “Oh, hey, it’s fixed now?“

Hot tea, no kettle to wait for, and a good laugh.

It did highlight one thing to me though, we have a habit of assuming that someone else will take care of something, or that if something is not working that someone else has already investigated or is working on a solution. Or we feel irritation that no one else is taking some initiative….but then again…we don’t try either…because we assume that everyone else has already tried something, when, possibly, nobody has…..

It’s the Accountability Story – “Whose Job Is It, Anyway?”

This is a story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody. There was an important job to be done and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got angry about that, because it was Everybody’s job. Everybody thought Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn’t do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have.

The Story of Everybody, Somebody, Anybody And Nobody

Happy Friday.