Hot week at work with no A/C

This past week at work has been miserable, working in a building with absolutely no air conditioning. It's got lots of enormous glass windows and skylights in the ceilings that, while they let in a lot of light, also make the building oppressively hot when the air conditioning goes off. I haven't seen any HVAC technicians wandering around the building attempting to fix things and set them to rights while the rest of us melt and wither in the heat inside the library. Patrons are also not coming inside because of the heat. It's actually cooler outside than it is in the building. I think that they ought to allow us to wear shorts and sandals if they insist on sitting on their thumbs about the A/C repairs. Sure, not having to cool an enormous $50 million plus building (counting in the many cost overruns during construction) must be saving them a lot of money, but it's making patrons and employees perfectly miserable. It's hard for us to maintain our demeanor when we're wilting at our desks and unable to get cool because we have to dress properly for work and have no A/C in the building and oversized glass windows making the sunlight outside even hotter inside. I don't anticipate that the ventilation problems will be fixed anytime soon. Given how short we are of money at work, I imagine that they're just waiting until it cools down a bit so that they no longer even have to use the A/C anymore. The ventilation has been perhaps the single biggest bugaboo in our building since the day we opened a few years ago. The HVAC company that installed our system practically had to set up shop and have an office in our building, but they've been strangely absent of late and I almost never see them anymore like I once did. Maybe that's because construction was finally completed about a year after we moved in. Yes, we moved into a building that wasn't yet finished, but that's because the public was clamoring for us to move back to our old original spot instead of our temporary quarters in the suburbs where we moved during construction. But that had free parking, unlike what we have now, and it was ample and close to a lot of convenient things, like a large mall, many good restaurants and gas stations and we didn't have to deal with the downtown hooligans who frequent the library now that we're back in our old location again. So not only do we have to cope with the "street people" again, we're wilting in a building with a frequently balky HVAC system that seems never to work right. And we've been back in our newly constructed Main Library since late 2004, so we're coming up on four years of being in this new mega-library, but they still can't seem to get the ventilation system to work correctly. Our office has been plagued by a sewer smell emanating from the one air vent in our office near my desk, but no one seems to be able to solve the problem, and in addition to suffering from lack of A/C, we also have to deal with foul smells in our department. I'm about ready to bring in my 20 inch window fan and a batch of incense to blow good smells around the office and cool it off at the same time. Well, if things don't change soon, I'm absolutely serious about doing this. I'm tired of working in a hot smelly environment when it's supposed to be a library. Sure, I've only got to last 4½ years more before retirement, but if they don't get some really good HVAC people to come in and fix the damned ventilation system soon, I'm going to have a mighty hard time lasting that long. So we'll see what happens in the coming days and weeks. They'd better get things fixed soon or there are going to be a lot of very heated and angry employees demanding to know what's going on and what's going to be done about it. And I don't imagine that the patrons are too happy about things right now, either, given how relatively few people are coming in compared to other days when things are actually working. I know that some folks come in just to escape the heat of summer, but when it's hotter inside than it is outside, then it's best just not to come in and wilt while you're trying to read, use a computer or do whatever. Better to go to one of our branch libraries, get cooled off and have the side benefit of free parking on top of it. And anyway, it saves gas to go to your local neighborhood branch instead of having to drive all the way downtown, fight traffic and have to pay to park if you stay more than an hour. Given high gas prices, I am guessing that this is exactly what's been happening lately anyway.