July 17, 2005
I was driving down the project one day and I happened to notice that there was a flume on the high end of one of the curb and gutters. For those that don't know a flume is a runoff point for the water that would be collected in the gutter. In this case, if there was a flume on the high end of the curb and gutter, there would be no water to runoff because nothing would be draining to it. Obviously seeing this was a red flag to me that something wasn't right. I looked at the plan and sure enough, it wasn’t suppose to be there. So I went to my inspector Sue and I asked her "When you measure something up in the field, do you look at the plan to get the location?" Because when you post any item they ask for a location. She said "Yes, Why?" I said "Well I noticed that there is a flume that isn’t on the plan but it is on the project. I assume you measured it up, but why didn’t a red flag go off in your head and why didn’t you ask me why it was there but not in the plan." She said "I saw you talking to the contractor and I assumed that you told him to put it there." I knew right away that this was BS but I left her off and I said "Next time they place something and it isn’t in the plan please ask me." I told her that I would take care of taking that posting out of the system. Let me interject the story. At this point in the story I am under the thinking that she just screwed up and paid the contractor for work that he did but wasn't suppose to. And I was going to subtract out the amount of the item that she had apparently paid the contractor in our Field Manger program, this is the program that is used to record all of the contractor's work and generates the estimates which pays the contractor. Here is where it really gets good. I went to take the posting out of Field Manager and the Spreadsheets, and you know what, that flume wasn’t there. So I asked her about it. She just said "I must have missed it." I tried to explain to her that this is a big deal that we missed it, even though in this case we weren’t going to pay the contractor for putting in something that we don’t need. In this particular case it worked out but normally if it was something that was suppose to be there, we would have short changed the contractor about $500. So in a brief summary of the story, she not only watched them incorrectly do the work without saying a word, but then didn't pay for them to do the work. Oddly enough in this case, two wrongs do make a right. And that is exactly the way that she saw it. Unbelieveable.
Alright here are some pictures for you.
This picture was taken July 8th 2001, at my house down in the basement. Nate Andy and I the night of the Bon Jovi Concert at Summerfest.
This picture was taken the same night but after the concert, Nate and I wrestling in the kitchen. Believe it or not we had been drinking.
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