Engineering Geniuses....where's your dunce hat?

We have rain! Yay! SoCal doesn't get rain very often, so it's nice for a change in the weather. I am all for the ground getting saturated with lots of moisture, HOWEVER, we have a slight problem with it in our Cardiac Rehab building.

Basically the building needs to be razed to the ground and rebuilt. The patch jobs that have been done over the last couple ....decades or so haven't really fixed anything. We have leaks and gaps all over the place. After last year's rains (which weren't really that much), we had "repairs" done to prevent the leaking into the exercise room. Major problems that were "fixed" included building a drain along one wall so the water didn't seep under the wall and diverting the water down a little hill. The problem with this "repair" is that the drain empties out by our back door which is at the bottom of the handicapped ramp where we already had a problem of water accumulating and then coming under our back door into the exercise room! The engineering folks were told of this previously.....like years ago....and apparently their solution was to create this lovely diversion to bring more water to the area. (Wonderful job boys - when you get some free time I'd love for you to come over and hear my thank you speech) HA!

Our exercise room has a hard linoleum flooring which encourages water to spread out very quickly. The rain started this afternoon and within twenty minutes, there was already water coming into the exercise room (nice job engineering guys.....did you or did you not need a degree of some kind for your job?). My coworker and I called engineering to see if someone could come and provide a temporary fix for our long-term problem. A very nice, common sense kind of guy came over and checked out the issue. He agreed with my assessment of the situation - namely that some dumbass had decided the drain should divert the water to an already existing flood problem area and also noticed that the dumbasses had failed to put up rain gutters on the roof, so that all the water from the roof was also falling into our little flood pit and then spreading under the door into our exercise room. EXCELLENT! Can we give the head engineer an award for this peach of a job?!

Needless to say, when I left work about an hour later, we had a small lake in our exercise room and no way to prevent it from getting worse. The guy who came out to assess the situation was kind enough to put down some big ropey things that are supposed to soak up water. He put four of them down inside the door and that helped for about 30 seconds. Thanks anyway, common sense engineering guy. We also had a leak erupt from the ceiling into the exercise room.....that started a nice puddle on the floor before I could get a trash can underneath it. (Yay....I think we're up to about 5 leaks now)

The rain has ceased for the moment but we're supposed to get more storms this week and I SERIOUSLY doubt we will have anything fixed. Hell, I'm not holding my breath that the engineering geniuses will come up with a solution in the next decade. Hopefully I will no longer be at that same building and won't have to deal with it. Stupidity abounds in the corporate workforce.....I was just lucky enough to deal with it today.

Annoyed...party of one!