Looks Like Someone Has a Case of the Mondays

I've noticed that Mondays are bad days when you're the owner of a building that's under construction. Most Mondays of the past three months, I've gotten a call before 9 am informing me of that week's crisis. It's a rough way to start the week, especially when you're not a morning person and that call often wakes you up.

Today's crisis call was from Xcel Energy, informing me that there's no way our gas and electric meters can be set before December 10. This news was not totally out of the blue, because about a month ago we found out that Xcel sort of misplaced the application for new service that we submitted back in July, so although they've been working "as quickly as possible" since they rediscovered it, we've been stuck with no power for several weeks after we were ready to have it turned on. In fact, it's been a major issue during construction that we have only a small electric service, and no gas, which means the building doesn't have any lights or heat. That makes it impossible to work in there at night, and means that nothing dries well and we even have to worry about the pipes freezing. All this after the installation of our total-overkill ventilation system, which is capable of maintaining a comfortable temperature even if the building were relocated to Antarctica, but it requires power to do so. Our roof looks like aliens landed on it:



I've been on the phone daily with Xcel trying to get them to hurry up and turn on our service, and last week they told me it would be three to five business days, but apparently someone went into the system and noticed that they're actually three weeks out from the stage we've made it to. The various people I've been harassing at Xcel played Rock-Paper-Scissors to decide who had to tell me, and one of them was the person on the other end of my morning death knell. I argued for a long time, tried to come up with creative solutions (could we just use the old service until they could install the new one?--no way, the old service is totally incapable of handling the new load and is actually considered dangerous now, even though it wasn't dangerous two months ago when we disconnected it), and finally cried. No dice.

I considered spending the rest of the morning in the fetal position, but I pulled myself together and decided to proceed with my day as if we were still on track to open next week, because I wanted to make good use of the last day of my friend Max's visit (see below). When we got to the building, there were lots of guys there looking lively, but I saw a dark pall over them. The drywall crew was having a surprisingly emotive conversation about whether one of their girlfriends was getting too serious, which was interrupted by an argument about the sum of 1 1/4" plus 1 5/8". After that issue was resolved, they started talking about who needed a place to go for Thanksgiving, and inviting each other to various relatives' holiday meals, which would have been heartwarming if my heart had not been torn out and stamped on by Xcel. Then Aaron happened to mention that someone from Xcel had been there earlier doing an inspection, and we were on the schedule for our service to be turned on in a few days. Apparently there's nothing wrong with the old service and they just have to reconnect it. If I had time I would sue Xcel for emotional trauma.

So that was a bad start, but things got better. Max, a friend from California, had flown in this weekend to help us put the "state-of-the-art" in our kitchen. Max knows how to do more things that anyone else I've ever met, which is one of the highest compliments I can pay, and among his many skills is setting up awesome audio-visual systems. We spent the weekend on a crazy scavenger hunt around the great Denver metropolitan area, looking for the components necessary to rig up the video camera/flat-screen TV/computer/stereo system that will be part of the teaching kitchen. Some of these components are not standard-issue, and any normal person would order them online, but we didn't have time for that, so we got on the phone/internet and called every place we could think of in a 200-mile radius until we found what we needed. Micro Center is my new favorite store. We also spent some quality time in Best Buy, deflecting dozens of "are you folks finding everything okay?" assaults. Then there was an exciting interlude when we had to fit two big-screen TVs into Jill's Civic, during which Max measured the boxes and I employed my usual technique of ignoring the measurements and just trying to stuff the boxes in. As we used to say in my life as a research scientist, a week in the lab can save you an hour in the library. This reflects an interesting personality trait of researchers: you're supposed to read a lot about what other people have done, but in the end you just have to try things out yourself to see if they'll work (usually the answer is no when you're in science, which is one reason I don't play that game anymore). It's kind of like throwing yourself at brick walls to see if they'll break, as a profession.



Finally last night we set up the whole system at my house and watched "Office Space" on a big screen in my little living room, which was amusing. This is what it looked like:



Today was D-Day: it was Max's final day in Denver, and the last day before the ceiling gets totally closed up, so we had to construct our custom-made ceiling mounts for the TVs and run all the cables up in the attic. When I say "we", I mean Max, although I walked on ceiling rafters for the first time, which was scary. We were still up in the attic when we should have been driving to the airport, but we made it, and by the time I got home I was feeling really good about where we are in this project.