I attended the PGHOA annual meeting last night via zoom. Apparently, the new WA state law regulating condominiums requires HOAs to make meetings accessible to more owners. Fuck Yeah, WA state legislators! Nice to see someone has decided to stop requiring us to rip all our finger nails out trying to hold onto the past.
At the PGHOA annual meetings, technically, meetings plural, we went over next year’s budget proposed and accepted by the board. Absent 51% of the (had to be a quorum) folks at the meeting voting down the budget or revising it, this is the budget. When I was young, I used to look at these things pretty hard. Now, less so. It’s good to be young.
JJ is at least younger than I am, and she had some Questions, notably about the phone and the cable / internet lines. And to be fair, they were confusing. She tends towards hostility, but I bought into this thing back in the ‘90s and I’m much more interested in things going the way I want them to vs. getting into an argument about it. So I “clarified” her question, and CD, outgoing and just re-elected board member, told a story. The story went roughly like this.
Last summer, we finally redid the elevator, as current equipment was increasingly difficult to get parts for and was increasingly finicky (4 story building, elevator is original equipment dates from 1979). We did get a good lifetime out of that elevator. That elevator had — as elevators all over this country are required to do — a phone in it in case of emergency. Sometime during the year, possibly during the renovation, it was discovered that the phone no longer worked. A little bit of information here: if the phone doesn’t work, the elevator may not be used until the phone does work. A bit more flavor on that: we’d been paying for elevator inspections that the company we were paying to do the inspections were not doing. For years, maybe? If they had been doing the inspections, they presumably would have caught the phone problem. Since they weren’t, we don’t know when this started. A year or two ago, the board complained to the management company, and they gave us a different manager and she started catching a lot of stuff, which in turn led to us fixing a bunch of stuff. All to the good.
Anyway. The board member in question spent several hours over a period of time attempting to reach someone at the telephone service provider and … couldn’t. They were taking the payments and not providing the contracted service. Are we sensing a theme here?
So I start thinking about this. If the inspector aren’t inspecting, they won’t catch the phone. This is unlikely to be us as the first victims of this failure to provide service. (Who is inspecting the inspectors?) (Probably this is a paperwork production operation, so as long as the paperwork says the work was done, nobody catches it until the customers complain.) The reason our budget lines for phone / intercom / internet / cable are so weird this year is because that’s generally a deflationary item (if yours isn’t, your probably should look into that) and because we replaced the old phone service in the elevator (that wasn’t performing) by rolling it into the internet based system (which everyone should be doing everywhere).
I understand that you might be tempted to say something like, but I want a “real” PSTN copper landline! If you even know those words, which if you are saying this and you know those words, I hope you have already stopped driving in unfamiliar places, after dark and during rain and other bad weather and you should really have a discussion with the folks who love you about under what circumstances you will turn over your keys and when you replace your driver’s license it will be with a state ID card instead of a license. You might remember the olden days, when the copper landline would “work” even when the “power” was “out”. That’s because there was a big ole battery somewhere, which there increasingly isn’t and also if you are still feisty about this go several paragraphs back up and remind yourself of how _the elevator phone wasn’t working for an extended period of time because the provider was no longer providing the service but was still collecting the checks and just fucking ask yourself how much you are being scammed elsewhere in your life for the false promise that you can keep living like it’s the Reagan Era_.
The real question here — and may the goddess love and bless you and all those you love, because no one else is rewarding your patience so I hope you’re getting something out of it — is: How Many Other Elevators Is This Happening To?
Six years ago in a Ma Bell group on FB, someone posted:
“As a tech who worked tall buildings.
We used to get called out because the phone in the elevator didn't work.
Turns out some newish account manager look over the lines and canceled lines that had no activity
Yes my brothers that was the elevator phone!”
So back then, the risk was, oh, this line is never sued, let’s get rid of it. Things have happened since then.
https://dbscomm.net/end-of-service-for-landlines/“As of August 2, 2022, The FCC no longer requires telecom companies to provide/sell landline service to small or local telephone companies.”
I missed that development, and may return to dig into it more. Further from that source:
“FCC Order 19-72 was lobbied for as the cost of maintaining copper wire infrastructure has increased over the years, and telecom companies have grown to see it as a dead technology. So in August of this year, the large phone companies were no longer required to support copper landline service, known as POTS (plain old telephone service).
While larger telecom providers like Verizon and AT&T are moving on from costly copper wire and investing heavily in fiber optic communications, there is still a strong demand for service in elevators and buildings that are only wired for copper service.
However, some telecoms are holding onto their copper landline business for the time being and raising prices, industry insiders say that copper phone service will cease to exist by 2025. Another good reason to move on from POTS.”
Welp. I guess we rode that train right to the end of the line.
Anyway. I dug into this today in part because I was wondering whether there was any news coverage of this particular issue. What I learned is that the elevator guild knows all about this, and requirements on new elevators are really great in terms of accessibility and generally not having this problem, but buildings with a single, aging elevator are very much disconnected from that community if their inspection service provider isn’t providing.
My efforts to find an online database of elevator inspection permits were not successful for Seattle — the state maintains a database but it does not include Seattle and Spokane. Those cities do their own elevator inspection. New York and Texas both have a long history of periodic media coverage of problems with their elevators and inspection regulations (or lack thereof), but I suspect a fair amount of regulatory energy has been expended on trying to get private elevators to stop killing children, vs. ensuring that the existing regulatory framework isn’t rotting from within. I suppose we’ll keep having problems of increasing severity until there’s a movement for reform. Or maybe it’ll all be fine, because everyone will have to upgrade anyway for non-tragic reasons.
