There's a Song About That...

For the past two days, we've had a crew polishing and sealing the tiles in the bathrooms of our main building. These gentlemen were here until 11:20PM last night, and they'll be pulling another late night tonight. There are five bathrooms that are being renovated- two floors, each with a men's and a women's bathroom, plus a wheelchair accessible bathroom on the main floor with a diaper changing station. As an aside, we don't get stupid about our bathrooms here.

Looking around the main building, I am of the opinion that the drop-ceiling in the gift shop should have had first priority, it's looking a little ragged, with sagging tiles, some of them stained. The organization is a not-for-profit, so they receive grants, many of them earmarked for specific purposes- I suspect that the lady who liked clean restrooms was the one who donated this particular chunk of change. If so, her money was well spent, I looked at a finished floor, and it looked beautiful, like you could eat off of it.

In two of the bathrooms, there tiles missing from the floor. Yesterday, my boss told my co-worker covering the 5PM-9PM shift that he would bring over the missing tiles... nothing. The foreman of the crew cleaning the tiles asked me to let the boss know that the tiles were needed. I sent the boss an e-mail informing him of this.

Today, I arrived at 9PM, and my co-worker told me that the tiles never arrived... the boss thought that the daytime maintenance staff would be bringing the tiles over. This reminds me of a song from my childhood:





The missing tiles haven't been replaced... the contractors could always fill the gaps with grout before sealing everything... not a perfect solution, but perhaps the best one. In the meantime, I'm stuck in the main building until they leave for the night, and I'm not exactly great when it comes to chemical exposure- cleansers and solvents don't agree with my respiratory tract. I had opened up all of the doors to the building so there was cross-ventilation, but the foreman told me that early spring insects were flying into the building and falling onto the floor of the fume-filled bathrooms. I'm the only person in the loop here who would think that sealing insects into the finish of the tile floor would be cool, but that's because I'm a paleontology nerd. Once the contractors leave, I think I'll stay outside for the rest of the night, or maybe hunker down in one of the other buildings with these two.