George leaves for vacation and Dave Smith, our lead maintenance man, is in charge. With the Boss gone, Dave and the Maintenance Staff are anticipating a peaceful week. Not so.
It’s after midnight and Dave gets a call from the security service. “You need to come in now”. The bar code reader at the Manta Court Gate is down. The reader is mounted on a steel post, but someone, or something, has managed to tear the post from its mounting and the entire apparatus is lying in the street. Maybe vandals because this is the same night that most of the letters have been taken from the signage at Selva and La Cresta.
Not wanting to be the only one to have fun, Dave calls Tom, and together they begin working in a dark and soon to be rainy night. Using some duct tape and wood blocks from Dave’s truck they get the unit back up, erect, and working. The temporary fix has the reader back in operation, but now it is raining harder. The glass that protects the electronics in this six thousand dollar unit is broken, rain will destroy it. Not to be deterred by this minor problem, Dave duct tapes his umbrella to the top of the post and leaves it there until morning when replacement glass will be purchased and installed. It must have been an interesting sight for any Manta resident returning from a late night event.
Sunday, Dave’s day off, he gets a call from Dennis. “You need to come in; there is no chlorine in the spa”. After a few hours of trouble shooting and manually adding chlorine, a blown fuse on the chemical controller is discovered and replaced. The spa is in safe operation, the residents are happy, but Dave’s Sunday is gone. It does help Dave understand why George is sometimes a little cranky on Monday mornings.
The rest of the week was fairly normal with problems fixed during working hours. An extra large T.P. mess was cleaned up. The Cabrillo gate remained open until an electronic problem was found and fixed. Someone drove through the Selva gate pulling a trailer and taking out the traffic arm. When the sensor sees that the car has passed the gate, the traffic arm drops to the down position. So the following trailer will get the arm every time. And then there is the issue of traffic arm damage at the Garibaldi Gate. It happened four times this week. It is not an expensive fix as we use inexpensive rain gutters for the arm. It does take valuable Maintenance time and we are working to understand and correct the problem.
—Jack Christiansen, Chair
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