"Yay! Lee Chong Wei beat Lin Dan! Chong Wei won the Swiss Open 2009 Men's Single by beating Lin Dan 21 - 16, 21 - 16. Yay!"
Ok, calm down. Take a deep breath...... ok , back to some serious stuff :p
I was marking some reports in my office today when I suddenly heard some cracking sound on the floor. Upon checking, I saw some tiles on the floor beside my desk bulging upwards. When I stepped closer to have a look, the cracking became louder and more frequent. The shelf above the bulging tiles was leaning to one side and my pot of cactus had toppled. All of us in the room (I'm sharing the room with 2 female colleagues) got worried as the cracking sound could be heard from the outside. We're worried that our room would collapse! We quickly took our precious belongings, left the room and reported to the staff in-charge of this stuff.
While waiting, colleagues from other departments (especially those in the civil, construction and architecture fields) came over to have a look, bringing with them measurement device, tools, etc., while discussing some of the possible reasons (settlement since the land used to be a tin mine, poor construction, tension due to changing conditions, etc.). Some even joked about earthquake.
One of them broke a piece of tile to check the structure below. To our relief, the concrete structure was still strong and flat. Only the tiles had come off. See the pictures below:
Take a look at the bulging tiles.
See that? The tiles had come off......
Glad that my room won't collapse after all. But we are monitoring now, and if something out of the ordinary happens, we'll request for a new room.
Anyway, I started commenting on the poor quality, poor workmanship..... until a colleague's remark shut me up.
The magical remark?
"Even Parliment leaked."
5 comments:
Eh the exact thing has happened to my room before! Tiles bulging and cracking. I wasn't there when it happened but my housemate told me it sounded like explosion! But yea, it didn't collapse. It has something to do with workmanship of the tiling. You'll have to redo the flooring again. It will be a mess! *reliving my nightmare*
there are two explanations for tile bulging and cracking.
1. There's air gap in the tile and right beneath it is a heat source, e.g. overheated lights. This will cause popping and splitting of tiles.
2. Settlement of the building is lopsided, this is the scariest.
Witch: In your bedroom? So you had to move out while they did the flooring?! I can just imagine the nightmare cuz last time we had to redo the flooring in the bathroom attached to my bedroom due to water leaking downstairs. At least, this time it happened in my office, not my personal bedroom.
CY: My office is situated on the ground floor, so I don't think there's any heat source underneath it. As for the second explanation, does it mean it might settle down and collapse?!
In conclusion, someone did not do their job right... :P air gap, then the person did not paste nicely, lopsided, means the engineer or land surveyor (is there such a job? :P) did not do their jobs correctly... me, I think it's the tiles are placed to tightly and the expansion and compression caused it to crack...
yinhoon: the land in ur office is probably refilled land. These normally need substantial compacting and some settlement time for the soil to settle before building on top of it. Furthermore, after the building is built, most of the time it will experience some settlement also. It's when something's not done right, that settlement is at different rates and cracks appear.
you probably should inform management and let them get geotech guys to find out wat's the problem.
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