Dear Diary: HR Stories from the Edge. The Swooooosh Heard ’Round HQ
Some buildings have quirks. This one had a personality disorder.
The client’s corporate HQ was nice, the kind of place with a clean lobby, polished signage, and conference rooms named after aspirational virtues like Integrity and Velocity. And yet: the plumbing.
For years, there were episodes. A mysterious water stain here. A ceiling tile swap there. A leak that would show up regularly for a few weeks, then disappear for months like it had joined a wellness retreat.
Everyone had a theory. No one had a diagnosis. And because the problem wasn’t constant, it never rose high enough on the priority list to get fully investigated and fixed. It just lived there, quietly … waiting.
The Day the Building Got Tired of Being Ignored
One afternoon I’m holding a meeting in the team’s conference room, normal agenda, normal faces, normal corporate oxygen.
Then we hear it.
A loud, unmistakable: SWOOOOOOSH. Not a drip. Not a trickle. Not even a suspicious gurgle. A swooooosh is a statement.
Everyone froze. We all looked at each other like, “Did anyone else just hear the building… exhale?”
No one spoke. No one volunteered a guess. Even the overconfident guy who always has a guess had no guess.
And then the contractor in the office next door walked into the conference room. He was dripping wet from head to toe.
I mean soaked. Like he’d been rinsed in a car wash. His hair was flattened, his shirt clung to him, water was literally running off his sleeves and pooling near his shoes. For half a beat, it looked like a sitcom freeze-frame.
Then the room split into two instincts at once:
Instinct #1: MOVE. Towels. Facilities. Shutoffs. Safety.
Instinct #2: Uncontrollable laughter.
We did both. Because we’re professionals. But also human.
We grabbed anything absorbent (including one suspiciously decorative throw blanket someone had brought in for “vibe”), got him into a dry area, called Facilities, and started damage control immediately.
And while we were moving fast, we were also bent over laughing, because the universe had made its point with excellent comedic timing.
The Part Nobody Wants to Talk About
After the laughter came the real conversation: Why was a known issue allowed to live this long without a true root-cause fix? How many “small incidents” had been normalized into background noise? And what else were we collectively tolerating because it was intermittent, inconvenient, or politically annoying to push?
Because here’s the truth: intermittent problems are the most dangerous kind. They lull organizations into complacency. They create a culture of “we’ll deal with it when it gets bad.” And then one day, it gets bad. Loudly. Wetly. In front of witnesses.
What We Did Next (The Unsexy, Money-Saving Part)
Once the immediate mess was handled, we treated it like an operational incident, not a funny story.
Documented the event (yes, even the comedic ones).
Escalated it as a repeat risk with an impact pattern (not a one-off).
Required a root-cause analysis with a deadline, not we’ll monitor it.
Set a clear owner and a follow-up cadence until resolution.
And quietly but firmly, made it clear that nice HQ doesn’t mean well-managed facility risk.
Lesson Learned
If something keeps leaking (water, accountability, clarity, trust), don’t keep replacing the ceiling tiles. Fix the pipe. Because the longer an organization tolerates known issues, the more it trains people to believe that:
Discomfort is normal,
Deporting doesn’t matter, and
Prevention is optional.
And HR sees this pattern everywhere, not just in plumbing.
The same logic shows up in:
We’ve always had some turnover.
Managers are just… like that.
We’ll address comp equity next cycle.
We don’t really have time for performance management.
Until one day: SWOOOOOOSH
One Question to Ask This Week: What problem are we calling intermittent that’s actually just un-owned? Because if no one owns it, it doesn’t get fixed. It just waits for its moment. And some moments arrive soaking wet.
