Burning Bridges

It is never smart to burn a bridge. Sometimes you do not know you have burned it until you need it. One of the rooms in my office is not cooling down even though the air conditioner is on. Normally it would not really matter, but this room is the one that we are running a drug study from and it must be a certain temperature. The room is on a 24 hour temperature gauge and the company will know if it runs too hot. Since it went over the top limit by 1 degree, I had to call the air conditioning company to see what is wrong. I called at 8:30am and did not get a return call until noon. The company said that they were booked all day and for the next few days and would put us on a wait list. That was odd since normally, for the past 30 years, they come within a few hours. When I said that it was important to fix the issue, the woman on the phone said that maybe we should "Call the other company that did the last repair. Maybe they will come quicker". Then it dawned on me what was happening. Last year our building management made us move the HVAC units off of the roof and on to a platform so the roof could have air circulating on it. Our regular company came for an estimate and my boss thought it was too high so she went with a new less expensive company. I guess the old company was angry about that since they had been working for her for a long time and they thought the price was a fair one. Now, when she needed them, they wanted to show her that if you sever a relationship you need to suffer the consequences.