Is This How You Manage A Building

I was rather pissed off by the explanation given by the building management managing my office that I decided that I should write this complaint letter directly to them, with a copy being given to Far East Organisation, the overall in charge of the Far East Group in Singapore.

I refer to the abovementioned incident and my telephone conversations with your Management Office staff, Ms Linda on 14 April 2011 and an unidentified male staff on 18 April 2011.

I am one of the staff working for P.C. Lee & Co at Units #10-05/#10-06. I have since worked in this company for about 3 years. During my stay with this company, I have discovered that the 3 passenger lifts at the building would take turns to break down in a month. Sometimes, the lifts would actually break down for a few days.

I would like to relate my 2 experiences of being trapped in the lift recently. The 1^slt incident that happened 2 weeks before the abovementioned incident. My lift ride was stopped abruptly on the 6^th floor, and there was no display of which direction of where the lift was heading and the storey button did not respond to my touch. The fortunate thing was the lift door was able to open by itself after suddenly stopping.

I was not so lucky for the 2^nd time on 14 April 2011. I was going for my lunch when my lift ride was abruptly halted on the 6^th floor. This time, the lift door did not open. Therefore, my colleague and I took turns to press the alarm bell. When there was no response from your side after 5 minutes, I called back my own office to get the number of your management office. Meanwhile, another lady who was in the same lift as us called OTIS, the lift maintenance company engaged by the management. We were surprised to hear that we were to stay in the trapped lift for about another 30 minutes, as this was what the OTIS staff had told her when she asked him when he could send someone down to rescue us. I called the Management Office 3 times after that, in the course of the 25 minutes we were trapped in the lift before we were being rescued by the OTIS staff.

My questions for you are as follows:-

1. Why is the lift at Far East Shopping Centre always breaking down? It is not as if that we have not been paying maintenance fees for you guys to do a proper job to maintain the building and its facilities and this includes the lift. I understand that you would levy a late payment charge when we pay our maintenance fee late, even for one day. This means that it is only right that we expect a first class service from you, since you are so prompt in collecting maintenance fees from the tenants. I also understand that the management fees have always been raised every year, but it seems like no improvement is seen in my 3 year stay in this building. If the lift always break down, please spend some money collected from the management fees to replace them.

2. Why must the Management Office wait for the OTIS maintenance guys to come and rescue us? Why are the staff not trained on lift rescue operations? According to my dad, who used to work as a Building Maintenance Manager at a major Orchard Road shopping centre said that the management office staff should have a spare key to access to the lifts when incidents happen. They are supposed to be rescued within 10 minutes. To be trapped in the lift for 25 minutes is ridiculous, and you are talking about a shopping centre cum office building in Orchard Road. I have been trapped in a lift at my old office at Keypoint at Beach Road before and I was rescued within 10 minutes by the building maintenance staff. The building maintenance staff also sent an apology note to all the affected users of the trapped lift. I have only heard you pushing aside your responsibility and giving excuses such as passengers’ fault in misusing the lift.

3. The Management Office should think of ways to improve the lifts, as it is always slow, instead of handling tenants’ petty complaints, like one of the offices had too many wet umbrellas being left out to dry at the office corridor during rainy weather. The sight of your staff carrying a camera just to take pictures of the wet umbrellas blocking the corridor are a waste of time. They could have used this time to think of a way to create space for us to put our wet umbrellas during rainy days. This would definitely heed the Government’s call for our people to be productive and innovative.

I hope to hear a favourable explanation from you with regards to how you are going to solve the problematic lifts at Far East Shopping Centre.

Thank you.

Yours faithfully,

Let’s hope the management office wakes up from their slumber and solve this as soon as possible.