A holiday tradition of incompetence.

A year ago I wrote this: Beep beep BEEP, the upshot being that one year ago during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, loud and obnoxious fire alarms went off at the Mercantile Arcade building and stayed on 'til after midnight, presumably due to the alarm contractor having gone home for the Holidays and no one at the management company knowing how to operate the alarms.

A year has gone by, and a lot has changed. There are large banners proclaiming "Now LEASING!", and presumably construction is done, systems have been approved by the City, and people are actually living in the building.  I feel sorry for those people, as sometime mid-yesterday, the fire alarms went off, and as of this writing, 6:00 AM the next day, they are still running. The noisemaker part of the alarm did stop but the strobes are still going, bright enough to illuminate my loft right through the curtains.

It's my understanding that the City requires alarms to have a timer that automatically shuts them down within half an hour. Although the noise alarm did shut off, the strobes are obviously still out of compliance a year later. Made me wonder, as I watched the weird shadows the strobes made on my ceiling last night, how stupid could the folks at Fifth Street Funding be? Hell, I've known for over a year that Thanksgiving would be celebrated again in 2010.  They had a whole year to plan to have someone available during the holiday weekend trained to push a goddamned button. Question is, was that task too difficult for their little minds, or do they just not care? Don't look at me, I don't know. Like Glenn Beck, I'm not saying that Fifth Street Funding are all a lot of incompetent douchebags, I'm just raising the question.