Construction in any form is nuts. I happen to do both residential and commercial work and the problems I encounter are so out of this world. Today we had two totally different issues arise - and they are eye openers:
Residential issue: we are doing a federal reno for Health Canada on a FN. Client house is lived in by older couple and 6 kids/gk's. GP is likely experiencing early onset of dementia and outbursts are starting to get violent. It's grumpy old man syndrome on steroids.
We are busy working around GP because he won't move into the temp housing, and making it bearable. We did roof, windows, doors, ceilings drywalled, painted, flooring, painting, and new bathroom. It's a messy job. Living there will be tough. But he is.
This am - he attacked physically my foreman, in front of a bunch of family. Thankfully, my guy was cool as a cucumber. Council and family stepped in, GP apologized, and we got back to work. Bit later, GP asked my foreman for some help - my foreman helped GP with his socks.
The reality is that tradesmen in residential work get a lot thrown at them and often they just want to get the work done. But sometimes, you get caught up in really weird situations, and you have to work outside the box. And use compassion while standing your ground.
The commercial issue - we are doing electrical on a bulk fuel station in the north and once again, we are coming into a project going sideways. Why? Because the engineering firm did not provide a basic item - construction drawings vs bid drawings. They are not the same thing.
Construction drawings show things like P&ID, control wiring, sensors, pump wiring. In a bulk fuel plant, that means pulling km's of wire through cable trays, and you only want to pull once. Eng firms are clearing out, and not doing this. The result? Delays.
When do you see the delay? Often in electrical, it's during start up. Right now, we have frozen pumps, frozen sensors, and all kinds of missing control wiring. Today, it's not enough that pumps etc have power. They are wired back to complex control panels with safety measures.
Eng firms, and the GC's are working off of incomplete drawings, missing critical items, and at the end of a project, it's a shit storm to pull it all together. When change orders are being issued, new drawings are not being issued. This is lazy, and costs time down the road.
Eng firms are calling for all kinds of instrumentation, but no one is checking to see if the relay and controls are designed to actually communicate as per design. It's often left to contractors like myself to fix the problem. Why? I'm not the engineer.
People wonder where your tax dollars on infrastructure go - this is it. Poor planning, execution, incomplete designs are costing you the taxpayer big dollars. But I don't understand why!!! Why, when communication is so much easier, is it that problems are happening more often?
It's like the Eng Firms don't really have a grasp on both the science, and delivery of a project. How can a blind Eng direct, oversee a GC? How does field engineering happen? It's a mess, and it's getting worse.
The end result, my guy is pulling fucking wire at -36 C, and getting shit done, and implementing field solutions with the rest of the GC's team to get it done. Electricians are indeed miracle workers.
@threadreaderapp can you please unroll 👍
