We had a great response from all of you readers last time we did this so we are opening it up for another round of comments from fellow feds.
Federal employees have a lot to deal with. Congress has slashed budgets governmentwide while the sequester has forced agencies to initiate furloughs. Feds are being asked to do more than ever with fewer resources and are being stretched to the limit.
But beyond all that, it seems that some federal employees are working in barely functioning facilities. There have been stories of mold, exploding toilets, cracked ceiling tiles and leaky plumbing. Agencies have multi-billion backlogs of repairs and maintenance that have not been funded in years, and feds are paying the price.
What is it like at your building? Has something broken and just not been fixed? Have you been told that repairs to bathroom fixtures are not on the table? Tell us all your horror stories about where you work by commenting on the blog, or feel free to email me at amedici@federaltimes.com to talk about your issues.
7 Comments
Brand new building, supposedly top of the line, green construction… a/c comes on in the winter, heat comes on in the summer time. They’ve had a year and a half to fix it. We sometimes wear gloves to work in the winter – and we’re in a warm climate.
my building was built in the mid 40s and the AC/Heat has been computerized and they cannot seem to get it right no matter what time of the year. We too wear gloves in the summer and would love to run a heater but have been told only the folks with certain heath issues can use them and the rest of us suffer and of course the morale goes even lower than it was (and at best it was only .5 on a scale of 1-10) our production goes down and yet management seems to not care/see the issues! My office was washed away in a flood last year due to the roof is flat and the drains were clogged with leaves and the rain had to go somewhere, and it did, it took out my desk all my work I was working on, and I had to try and replicate what I had done. We finally got someone to clean the rain down spouts but, the whole office sat around for 8 hours doing nothing becasue of neglect of the maintenance folks. We had no a/c, no lights on some work stations, no computers becasue there was so much water in the office. My office finally took it up on ourselves to clear it up because the maintenance folks never showed up. It smelled like mold and mildew for days afterward. Management just did not want to step up and make it right.
I work in the foreign arrivals area of a major airport terminal. Although not a gov building, the space we occupy is. Our office space is located below concourse A which above us are junk food eateries. About two months ago our office was flooded from above with raw liquid sludge waste from the drain pipes that broke overhead above our ceiling. It was so bad it was deemed a HAZMAT emergency. While they did bring cleaners to sanitize everything, they threw out a lot of stuff, replaced the carpet tiles and took air samples, we are still waiting to move back in. The first air sample mysteriously disappeared? The second one said the air was fine? We are still waiting to reoccupy our office space. I would also add that this terminal is fairly new opened in 2001 and has been plagued with black mold since day one to include the ATC tower. Sewer gases emit from floor drains, jet fume exhaust enters from our HVAC system overhead, the pump rooms out in the hallways flood periodically causing more hazmat cleanups, we have sparrows flying around inside that deficate on the window sills. The entire office space is an open area yet half of it is always cold and the other half hot? We will be lucky if we survive this place?
The Department of Energy Headquaters Building is the worst! Leaky ceilings, paper thin walls, mouse traps in offices, roaches in many of the offices, mold, and an antiquated phone system that does not allow multiple incoming calls.
Cockroaches big enough to saddle, no A/C in the summer due the the sequester…80 degrees…hallways flood when it rains…mice after dark…NICE!
overrun with mice, moldy smell, severe parking problems, the worst county bus system to the Metro, freezing building, security like Supermax, peeling paint. land mines still in the ground around the building, part of the garage collapsed, no hot water in some of the bathrooms for about a month, this and more that is in a building that just opened 2 years ago.
Broken leadership and management at the top level