Since we’ve come back to New York this month, we’ve noticed that in our building, which is a newly built, luxury high rise building in the city, the heating has been inconsistent. Sometimes, the HVAC unit, while on a heat setting, doesn’t blow out hot air and seems to just blow out… air. Other times, it does something even worse: it blows out COLD air. We are currently in winter time in the dead of January here in New York City, and this is completely unacceptable, especially given how much we pay to live here. So we’ve had the handyman come and look and tweak things a few times, but they quickly realized that it had nothing to do with our HVAC units per se, but rather the changes in temperature that a certain someone working downstairs has been doing to the master heating units.

The handymen let us know that our super, who seems to think that his paycheck is going to get some deduction for the amount of money spent on heating in this building, has been turning down the heat setting for all units in the basement. Yet, this seems to affect only higher floors… not the lower floors, where he himself lives. In the instant the super has made these switches downstairs, tenants have flooded the doormen with complaint calls about lack of heat. Wow – how surprising that tenants would notice something like this!

You have to wonder what kind of incompetence and total lack of consideration would have to be behind something like this. But hey, that’s fine. If the super of the building thinks he can get away with this type of thing with no complaints to management, then he’s totally wrong.