Car Lift Outage - (both lifts) Nov 18th

When both car lifts were in service at the same on Monday 16th Nov just two days ago, I said to myself that I must write a sarcastic message on the blog saying: "Hurrah! Both lifts working at the same time?"

With a busy schedule Monday and yesterday I intended to write about it later on today. Good to see that the outages being managed (or not) by Messers Thompson Moulton (part of Sutton Kersch), and Otis are still displaying complete ignorance to the effects on residents and a high level of professional incompetence.

Both lifts working lasted little over 48 hours!

This morning at 7am I was lucky/unlucky enough (yet again) to be directly involved. Upon entering Car Lift 2 (right-hand when viewed at street level) the lift proceeded to go up instead of down, and stopped on the 5th floor despite using the fob, and actually perssing the ground button as driving into the lift. After my venture up instead of down, the lift, upon heading in the right direction then proceeded to stop at every floor on the way down to the 1st, where it duly stopped.

After pressing the button for ground from within the lift, the doors would promptly close and I assumed I would be at last on my way. No such luck. The doors then opened whilst still on the 1st floor and after repeating several times with no additional response I reversed out to see if there was someone calling the list to the first floor, which could of affected the lift?

Upon reversing out on to the 1st floor (not my car floor) I saw that there was no other people waiting and assumed (correctly) that a fault was to blame. However, I thought I would give it one more chance and drove back in to the lift and tried for the ground level once more.

I would love to say that I left and made my merry way to an appointment in respect of my business, BUT that would be as accurate and truthful as the Thompson and Moulton / Building Managements claims that the problems are being sorted. In otherwords complete and utter bullsh*t.

Sensing the only option of freeing my trapped car was to reverse out onto the first floor and try Car Lift 1 (left-hand from street level). However, as Level 1 is not my car level, the fob to call the lift is obviously redundant and as such I attempted to see Concierge but at 725am I was not hopefull and upon going down to the office saw that it was empty. (anyone else see the promise of 24 hour Concierge upon moving in?)

Upon returning to the car, someone else was leaving and he kindly called the lift for me, so that I could leave. However, another car got trapped on the first level repeating my experience and to make matters worse, every car leaving via lift 1 would stop at all the floors on the way down thereby making it 4 times longer to use the lift!

The other person waiting also responded that he is moving out as a direct result of the issues with the car lifts.

Finally when the lift came I was lucky to get out BUT by being an hour late and missing a vital travelling hour from 7am to 8am in less motorway traffic I was now late, and the problem was compounding. The net result is that today, I personally have lost another half day which has to be rearranged causing loss of earnings.

Alexandra Tower - Ongoing Problems

Whilst the main issue at present seems to be the car lift, (and please post your comments on that), use this post to notify me of any other issues that you maybe experiencing and I can then post another category on that subject to get everyones response on any other issues.

I have started a dialogue with the management company and should be feel it useful, I have alerted the management company (Thompson Moulton), who are part of Sutton Kersch, about the feelings of many of the residents and the desire to arrange a Residents Meeting with all parties concerned.

At present there are several interested parties with their own agendas and at times it can be very frustrating for the residents in trying to get a) answers, and b) an outcome to the problems. As such, the bank and the reciever's interests may not lie directly with the residents and so in short, they should be made aware of the residents wishes and feelings (hence this forum).

Taking the car lift as an example, there is the original installer, the manufacturer, Otis who now manage the ongoing maintainance, the bank Barclays, the management company, the recievers who handled Millenium Estates liquidation, and the residents.

With the car lift, thats 7 parties with an interest and their own agenda, yet its the residents, and not any other party that has to directly put up with the problems and the fall out from them.