I attended a retirement luncheon on Base the other day and drove past the building I used to manage. (I would always smile a little when folks would ask me if I was the BM. I’d tell them that I managed the building about as much as the Army Corps managed the Mississippi River.)
Seeing the building however, did bring back a lot of memories such as when I became the first building manager of the newly constructed NAVAIRHQ’s building and I sat down with a rep from the construction company. In describing the background to the project, the rep told me that all construction projects are contingent upon cost, schedule and quality. He said that the NAVAIRHQ’s building was constructed along those 3 lines and in that order. “You got a good building here.” he said. “However, and that’s with a capital H, you are going to have some problems because the Navy told us that cost and schedule were the drivers and that quality took a back seat. Be prepared.”
His warnings were correct too as there some major problems with how the casements around the windows were installed. Whenever we would have a nor’ easter with the rain whipping in sideways, the building would leak on the north east side. Since all of the head honcho’s just happened to reside on that side of the building, every major storm resulted in a major mess for us to deal with.
Since retiring from the Base seven years ago, I have grabbed a weekly lunch with Charlie Harless who succeeded me as the manager of the HQ’s building. Charlie tells me that despite several attempts to fix it, the building will still leak whenever we have a nor’ easter. Charlie says that they’ve written it off as a live-with situation. This graphic pretty much summed it all up:
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| From http://www.theczabe.com/ |