u/No_Heart6145

TLDR: Elevator broke because "elevator control lever stuck in the moving rack/rail", is this common after using it with too much weight?

We live in a building whose administration is shared periodically across the owners of each apartment. The current administrator saw that we had a moving company that was setting up our kitchen and they used the elevators to load all the material upstairs to the 3rd floor. When they were doing this, the current administrator was perplexed by the way they were using the elevators, saying quote: "they were being brusque and putting too much weight on it". Nevertheless, the company continued loading, with the administrator claiming that they ignored him, and later after they moved everything upstairs the elevator stopped functioning in the 1st floor. Then they accused us and said that we have to pay for the repair. I called the elevator company to go there and fix it and they wrote on the report: "elevator control lever stuck in the moving rack/rail". Can this problem occur because there was too much weight on it? The elevator is very old (probably 40 years +) and it often has issues.

I don't know if this is the right subreddit for this.

TLDR: wrote a project proposal Y for a fellowship and there is already a postdoc in the lab working on this data.

So I have been in contact with this PI whose recent work I really like. Their research area is different from mine and I love the prospect on delving more into this new area with the knowledge that I bring from a CS background. Now, to explain the situation, for the sake of anonymity let's say this PI has an ongoing project X. When first talking with the PI, I was really excited about the idea of extending this project X with Y. In a second meeting they said that there is already a postdoc working on Y. At this time I already had a first draft for a fellowship proposal with the whole Y idea written. Today I had a meeting with this postdoc and I felt really bad during and after the meeting, because if I was a postdoc in a lab and heard there was someone else proposing Y, I would be kind of mad and disappointed. Now since we come from different backgrounds, I can easily propose Y (method wise) but extend it to other applications and frame the project differently. So I think it would still be possible for me to do it because there is a component inside Y that can be methodologically novel and I always wanted to work on this. The thing is I really value work environment and I got out of the meeting with the feeling that being in the same work environment as this other postdoc wouldn't be nice, because of this feeling of "stealing" their project. I'm kind of venting but at the same time looking for validation on this. Would you still go for it? Just for the sake of it and maybe this other postdoc is not there anymore when I arrive to the lab. But if they are in the lab then things may be weird. The ETA for me to be in the lab would be more 1.5 years from now. Have any of you gone through something similar? Can you share your experience where you had a lab member and you working on the same thing and that left a bitter taste?