The Union Breaks Father's Day Promise

The Union Hotel, the subsidized apartment building I live in, is managed by people who can't figure out how to treat their tenants with respect.

The latest insult happened today. We were told days ago that there would be a Father's Day Brunch at noon in the community room today. There were notices placed in the halls to that effect, and at the front desk.

The notices said that there would be no 7 AM breakfast today.

As I have said before, I don't want their breakfasts anyway, so I have insisted on not being woken up at 7 in the morning with reminders of the breakfast on the intercom. So as a result of my complaints, lists of tenants who wanted breakfasts were created, and only the people on the lists were called for them.

There's no reason for the intercom reminders anyway if the management could just make the meals happen at the scheduled time.

Today, Anitra and I went down to the community room to join the Father's Day Brunch at its scheduled time, 12 noon.

We saw nothing happening and asked the desk person what was up.

What was up was that the meal had already happened at 10:45 AM. She had gotten a call from management just this morning telling her to notify everybody on the breakfast call list of the change of times.

Just because some bonehead imagined that the brunch would happen in lieu of the breakfast, they told her to handle it as she would have handled the regular Sunday morning breakfast, even though it was an entirely different event. A noon Father's Day brunch is not a breakfast.

First, they broke the promise about when it would happen. Then they violated their own protocols, which called for announcements of onetime events between 8 AM and 10 PM.

I've told the story about how the intercom protocols came about in my column for Real Change. I titled it for Adventures in Bloggery as Be Silent, Consume, Die. All I wanted was not to be called on the intercom at times when I would want to be sleeping. I agreed to allow that they would call me during the day for special events like this. THEY insisted on that. So I have taken them at their word on it, and come to expect it.

Their word means crap.

They can't ever put themselves in our shoes. They have less respect for the people who live here then they have for ugliest fish in the lobby aquarium.

This comes right on the heels of similar broken promises involving a nutritional class (PTSD, posted just June 5).

It compounds the anger I expressed in Rage And Counter-Rage, just last May.

The inability of these people to figure out what they need to do to keep my experience here from amounting to one insult after another did not begin with the current manager. See Social Services Gripe for a complaint about the last one.

But the current management can't seem to get anything right.

PS: Only a fraction of the residents are on the call list (I'm blanking on the number -- I remember it as being 7 out of 52 -- but I know its fewer than a third.) So in excess of 30 residents were misled about the time the meal would happen, and Anitra and I weren't the only ones in the lobby at noon finding out we were screwed.