Over the years, I've told colleagues and friends about things I have seen or experienced. Many times, people have said that I should write them down so that they won't be lost and forgotten, since some of them might be useful parts of our history. I've been writing them down, without being sure what I would do with them. I decided to gradually post them on this website, and see what reactions I get. I suggest reading from the bottom up (starting with the August 2017 post "The Meritocracy"). Thoughtful and kind feedback would be useful for me, and would help me to revise the exposition to make it as useful as possible. I hope that while you read my stories you will ask yourself "What can I learn from this?" I'm particularly interested in knowing what you see as the point of the story, or what you take away from it. Please send feedback to asilverb@gmail.com. Thanks for taking the time to read and hopefully reflect on them!

I often run the stories past the people I mention, even when they are anonymized, to get their feedback and give them a chance to correct the record or ask for changes. When they tell me they're happy to be named, I sometimes do so. When I give letters as pseudonyms, there is no correlation between those letters and the names of the real people.

Friday, May 6, 2022

The Little Blue Button


The cryptic October 19, 2012 email began by announcing that "Beginning Saturday, October 20, 2012, Facilities Management will be implementing a new Office Air Handler Unit (AHU) shutdown schedule." 

The memo seemed to say that to reduce energy costs, the air would be turned off all day on weekends, and between 6 pm and 6 am on weekdays, in the wings that house the math and chemistry departments and part of the physics department.

My office is in one of those wings.

The email said "the override buttons will enable you to turn the air handler unit ON for a two (2) hour occupancy" and that each office thermostat has an override button "indicated by a Sun/Moon symbol." 

However, most of the offices in the wings don't have thermostats (their temperature is controlled by some nearby colleague's thermostat). 

When the wings were built in 2008, I chose my office partly because the floor plan showed a thermostat. But my thermostat turned out to be in a locked box, and I'm not allowed to have a key to the box. When my whiteboard was installed, someone had to go to a lot of trouble to cut holes in it for the locked thermostat box and for the motion sensor that controls the lights. It seemed slightly cruel to be told that there is an override button in my locked box.

I replied to the email:
"Thanks very much for your message. I have a thermostat in my office, but it is in a locked plastic box. Could you please remove the box, so that I can access the thermostat? (This will also make it easier for me to use my whiteboard, since the thermostat is recessed in my whiteboard.) Thanks very much."

I sent a follow-up reminding them of my office number and saying I looked forward to hearing from them about plans to unlock my thermostat. I never got a reply.

"For those who do not have a thermostat, please use the BLUE override button located on the hallway wall near the suite entry", continued the original email notification. "This new schedule will allow you to work in your office 24/7 with full control at the thermostat or blue button, rather than a schedule where the AHU turns off with no option to turn it back on."

I managed to find a little blue button on a wall at the far end of the hallway in my wing. Should I keep pressing it until the light goes on and stays on? Or goes off and stays off? The message didn't say, and I never remember which. If someone else already pressed it within the past two hours then it's already in the "on" mode. So I hold it for 20 seconds no matter what. (A colleague recently told me that the button's timing is erratic---it can take 25 seconds or more for it to light up.)

Some of my colleagues have told me that if they forget to press the button, or they forget to press it again after two hours, they eventually feel faint.

While the piece of paper above the button says "Hold Button For 5 Seconds", it doesn't say WHY to hold it. New students and faculty aren't told about the little blue button or its raison d'être, except for two cryptic "reminder" emails in November of 2014 and 2015.

Over the years, I've pointed out that informing new occupants of the wings about the existence and purpose of the little blue button is a health and safety issue. When I mentioned it at a meeting with staff from Environmental Health & Safety during the infamous Rowland Hall asbestos battle of 2018 (a story for the future), we were assured that annual reminders would be sent out from then on. It's more than three years later, and I haven't seen a reminder.