This is the author’s account, told in the third person like the rest of this book. No documents are attached and no records were checked, so nothing here is a finding. The bank, the head office, the buildings, the firms and the people are not named. It is the experience of a customer in a cooling failure: not engineering, and not sales experience.
A bank branch in New York kept computers that ran the ATMs and connected to mainframes. The room they sat in could not be warm. The ATMs ran from that room.
The alarm rang at 2am. The branch manager went in at 3am. The cooling had failed and the room was getting warm.
Only one place was open. The branch manager took a taxi there, bought a portable air-conditioning unit on a personal card, planning to ask for the money back later, and took it back to the branch. Before 5am it was cooling the space, “kinda” (the branch manager’s word: kind of). The equipment was not lost.
That is a temporary fix. It worked because a person decided it was theirs to solve and spent their own money on it. It was not a repair, and it is not a model for how a bank should handle cooling.
It took many firms to get the cooling properly fixed. The account does not say how long that took or what each firm found.
The author was then promoted to corporate banking relationship manager. The author’s account is that the bank told the author it was choosing the author over an outside candidate for the role. That is what the author was told; this page cannot check it or the bank’s reasons, and says nothing more about the other person.
The branch closed long after the author left it. The head office wanted it closed. This page does not say the cooling problems caused the closure or contributed to it, and the author does not claim they did.
Separately, in an office tower in midtown Manhattan, the author had heating and cooling problems as a tenant. The author’s account is that every firm consulted said it would have to start from scratch. Why they said so, and what each one quoted, is not recorded here. It is one person’s experience of one building, not a finding about the buildings or the firms.
What it shows. What a cooling failure costs from the customer’s side, and what taking responsibility for one on the spot looks like. A computer room that cannot be warm is a small version of the question a data center asks. That comparison is an observation, not a finding.
What it does not show. It does not show that the author can design or specify a cooling system. It is not engineering. It is not FP&A experience in the HVAC industry: it holds no budget, forecast or cost figure, and the numbers side of that work is in Chapter 2. It does not say any firm or building was at fault. It does not say why the branch closed. Whether the author was reimbursed for the portable unit is not recorded.