Helpful people and lots of phonecalls.
Today has been one to recover from yesterday: I was greeted with news from Jackie on reception that we had no hot water. I found that both the new boilers had gone out and wouldn’t relight and no hot water in the tanks. There not many worse things to find when you have a hotel full of people.
A few phone calls to our boiler installers and I knew the engineers were on their way, all we could do was wait and hope they would find something simple when they arrived. Jackie and Amy had to bear the brunt of the guests requests and comments about the lack of hot water, after all it is a basic commodity here which we take for granted. The girls were superb in the way they dealt with this extra pressure and our guests were generally very co-operative.
If that had been all it would hardly have merited a post but the engineers, Chris and Bear, found nothing wrong with the boilers, they called the manufacturer who sent an engineer who said it was the gas pressure, not the boilers themselves. More phone calls to National Grid ( no I didn’t know Transco had merged with them either) who came and checked the pressure on the mains, all OK there but still nothing. This time I had to call our supplier who had to log the issue with National Grid and told me it would be a 4 to 24 hour response. This did nothing for my blood pressure but remaining calm I did press upon the lady that we were a hotel that really couldn’t run without hot water, I know it isn’t the same as a hospital but all the same… After an hour Mark came back with his colleague Justin and after more checking found it was the meter that had siezed. Not the sort of thing that we keep spares of! They had a discussion with their supervisor and came up with a cunning and devious plan to get us back on line. We’ve got to about 5.30 now and people are wanting to shower before dinner. Mark and Justin came back with some spares later in the evening to fix our problem but had to wait until we had finished serving dinner before we could shut all the gas off. This was almost the smoothest part of the operation, out with the old, in with the new and we were away, all checked and sound and the boilers fired up 1st time and I was able to get away home knowing we had plenty of hot water just after 11.
This was a great example of all sorts of people going out of their way to help us out of a very sticky situation from our reception team who had to deal with all the guests to the different engineers who really went out of their way come up with ideas to get us back up and running: thank you all!
