The situation has gotten out of hand.
I wrote the original blog the week before I was to be out of the office for a week in
Anyone following my Twitters knows this was not, in fact, true. Since it was not fixed, this put the timeline at "broken just more than two weeks."
I was told a repairman was in the office two times the week I was gone: The first time to bring in the cleaning solution that was alluded to in the e-mail about not putting notes on the ice machine, and the second time because the cleaning solution did not fix the problem.
The second time, the guy saw the blinking light, pressed the off button and turned it back on again to hear it filling with water (just as my boss had already done the previous week), told our office manager that it wasn't broken because it just needed to be reset, and left. I was told the machine made four cubes of ice that time.
Our HR person then got two bills for $150 from the repairman. $150 to pour cleaning solution into the machine, and $150 to turn the machine off and on and say it was never broken.
At this point, Tim says, "It's not going to be fixed. The guy has already charged $300 for nothing. We could have bought another ice machine for that much. Did he really think we hadn't tried that already?"
I, meanwhile, didn't understand why this repairman had not been called back for a free visit because he had charged, at the very least, $150 to do nothing, so he owed us for shady practices ... but our office managers were getting exasperated and annoyed that we were asking about it so much.
Yesterday, I went into the breakroom, and there finally was a man on his hands and knees with tools unscrewing parts and taking parts off of the ice machine. I happily go out to report this, and Lee says that it is the same guy that did not fix it three weeks ago.
I still had positive vibes going because he was actually taking the machine apart this time, even though Tim was not convinced. Tim asked an office manager what the status of the machine was, and she said, "It is fixed. It has to run through the cleaning cycle which takes 24 hours, so at 2 p.m. tomorrow, it should have ice."
I went into the breakroom today at 2:05 p.m. to find the following:
It did produce about 30 cubes, but tomorrow marks the timeline at "broken for five weeks." When a coffee machine broke a couple of months ago, it was replaced in two days AND we have two coffee machines! I am feeling some iced-drink discrimination here. Edit that. A LOT of iced-drink discrimination.
