| Date: | October 19, 2005 / year-entry #312 |
| Tags: | non-computer |
| Orig Link: | https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20051019-10/?p=33703 |
| Comments: | 10 |
| Summary: | Portsmouth's ever-delayed Millennium Tower (since renamed Spinnaker Tower) has finally been completed, five years late and £11 million over budget. But even opening day couldn't escape without its own glitches, for the project manager was trapped in a glass-walled lift for over an hour, requiring abseiling engineers to come and rescue him. |
Portsmouth's ever-delayed Millennium Tower (since renamed Spinnaker Tower) has finally been completed, five years late and £11 million over budget. But even opening day couldn't escape without its own glitches, for the project manager was trapped in a glass-walled lift for over an hour, requiring abseiling engineers to come and rescue him. |
Comments (10)
Comments are closed. |
5 years late or 995 years early.
It wasn’t just the project manager who was trapped in the lift. Also trapped were the head from the construction company and the chief engineer from the company responsible for the lift! Nothing like eating your own dog food, eh?
Some VIPs were also trapped in the lift a week or two ago and had to be rescued. The cost to go up the tower is £4.95 with a £2 surcharge to use the panoramic external lift. I guess that goes towards the cost of keeping abseiling engineers on standby.
Still, I can see it from my office window and will go up it myself once it’s settled into the useful life part of the bathtub curve.
I live there, see it every day… Funny as heck… The thing is hideous too and ruins the sky line… But that is what happens when you give the civil service an opportunity to build something with no /real/ financial benefit except to celebrate some generic date roll over (see millennium dome).
It’s nothing to do with the Civil Service, I don’t know where you got that idea from. I don’t think it’s hideous at all.
From a guy that spends 20minutes looking in its general direction a day trust me, it is hidious… Maybe you don’t think so because all you can see is the top of it? Or maybe you never saw the Gunwharf skyline before they shoved it right in the middle.
They should publish the ‘risk’ of being met by abseiling (US = Rappling)Engineers as a potential highlight of the tower experience. For example, one in every 1000 trips YOU may be LUCKY enough to meet one of our amazing dare-devil abseiling engineers… I’d go up for that! Maybe they could even offer Abseiling training lessons from the tower. A liaison with portsmouth University’s mechanical engineering department could lead to an innovative field-work coure in practical engineering and abseiling. I’d want to sign-up!
It reminds me cases when Windows crashes in Bill Gates hands right in the middle of presentations.
:)) I guess it always happens when too much effort is put into ‘managing’ instead of getting competent people.
I’m always impressed how many german words make it into the english/american language. "Abseilen"… At first I thought I misread the word ;-)
Headline – "Engineers Rescue Project Manager drama!"
Was it not always thus?
Yes, it’s open, stop knocking it and get in the lift to the first floor for a wonderful view.