"your pisspoorplanning doesnt make it my emergency"
 

the quote goes something like that right?

i am stacked at work. i typically warn the contractor about upcoming submittals and stuff. the big stuff, they usually remember. now, i have very little luxury-time to preemptively worry about their responsibilities. i have enough timelines of my own i try to meet.

not this time. i had to shut down a project because their ducks are not in a row. hell, they are not even ducks at this points. eggs!! they have EGGS!

naturally, he's pissed. by contract i get 15 days to review something. most things. he needed them in hours, not days. errrr..okay. lunch is overrated, (so is peeing and pooping). i split the pile between a work bud, promised him a sandwich and we went to town. all good until every submittal got rejected. opps.

today was a planned day off. i am meandering in today. apparently, days off are overrated too. :) (pssst..shhhh..i have a package arriving at the office today anyways, dont tell anyone)

bright side? his problems are way better than when i have problems. ahhhhhh.. cant wait till beer-thirty!

My father's favorite saying: "Piss poor playing on your part doesn't make your problem my problem".

Words to live by...part of the art of "no". :D

Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part - pretty much how it goes if I remember right. Get some of the supervisors above you involved in getting things back on track. Maybe a little work on their parts will eliminate possibilities of emergencies on your part.

The way I've heard it- "Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part."

I also like the 6 Ps- Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance.

In the aerial photography business many clients want a project flown in the winter, or "leaf off" for the trees to be able to see through the trees. We for sure can't control springs arrival. We have clients that wait until the trees are budding to ask for a quote to fly a leaf off project. One thing for sure in most of the southwest, spring brings rain, and storms. We can't fly a project that specifies full sun, leaf off without clear skies and no leafs on the trees if it is cloudy, and we sure will not fly when the thunderstorms are everywhere.

So why do clients wait until the buds are on the trees and expect us to fly the project with out magic anti cloud ray gun or some other magic anti cloud system? And then the call on a day that is great for playing golf, but lots of big white puffy clouds and ask if we flew the project? We only get paid when we fly, we don't make any money with our airplane sitting in the hangar, we want it flown more than they do.

Even when the weather is perfect, and the trees are naked, it takes time to process the imagery. We get it done as soon as possible. So why does it take the client 4 months to pay us?

Once got asked about lunchtime on Xmas Eve ( just after my staff had gone home for the holidays, to make 150 tailored car covers for a January 2nd new car launch brand new model with none available for measuring yet England closes every year between noon on the 24th through the 2nd January. When would the organizers have known about the car launch do you think? Had to turn away the order as impossible to fulfill.

The art of saying No is to say "Yes" in such a way that it not happening is not your fault.

do the contract docs include a list of submittals or is that generated by the contractor, as a submittal?

my former public agency employer hired low end consultants. in one of many cost cutting examples that were prevalent again and again was to have the contractor submit the list of submittals. it was almost comical in how much was missed with this approach. I would often look for a submittal on a product to be implemented on a project only to not find one, or have it on the contractor generated list. I *****ed all the time with no relief, and finally just gave up.


another saying I used often there was "you pay peanuts, you get monkeys"

good question. his requirements are in a book about the size of an old dictionary. he has to look them up. (i have to look them up as well, but after all these years, they are vaguely burned into memory. i still have to look up the details, but i remember that it is basically required)

Cliff, do you have a role in contract awards? Keep track of when requirements & schedules aren’t met, and, when they bid on a project, factor that into your decision making. And be sure to let them know you consider that when recommending or choosing contractors for future projects.

Probably won't make a bit of a difference. 2 reasons: government and budget

that's rich! public contracts go to the "lowest responsible bidder". the responsible part open to interpretation.

This is the traditional wording I grew up with:

https://res.cloudinary.com/teepublic.../4401869_0.jpg

I've seen this displayed in so many shops I couldn't count them on two hands! The best was when it was on a coffee cup at a trailer shop I visited. That was awesome! :)

Yea, most government agencies only see that bottom line of cost. We bid on one big project for the local city & county group. All the cared about was price. One of the HUGE out of state companies did it for super cheap. They flew in the equipment from another state, and likely never landed to even buy fuel. They shipped all the mapping work to India, and they missed the deadline by over 6 months, and turned in real low quality deliverables, but dang it was cheap!

We are a local tax paying company, with an airplane registered in this state. We live here. All the work would have been done here, we would meet the deadline, and turned in high quality product, but it would have cost a little bit more. And when they call to ask a question, we would drive over and help them out with it. Instead of just blowing them off like the big guys.

you would be wrong. you would be surprised how many contractors get the call during their "high fives" when we discover they dropped the ball somewhere, somehow.

it is an awkward conversation, thankfully i dont have to make.

this just happened last week to an awesome (and dyslexic) contractor. opps.

I worked in digital imaging (Pre-Press) for a long, long time, and the challenges you speak of jigsaw perfectly with what I experienced. The pay was good, pleasant work environment, clients appreciated our hard work and effort to meet impossible deadlines with high-quality images; I was hoping to retire in the field, but that didn't quite work out because of cheap bandwidth and cheap digital storage and cheap labor. The trifecta of suck.

K.I.S.S., P.P.P., You make a better door than a window!, What part of I.D.G.A.S. don't you understand and best of all F the F. F.!


Best lines ever!

PEACE!

Yea, the internet and digital photography completely killed the industry I was in for almost 30 years, the photolab. There are likely more buggy whip makers than professional photolabs now.

My current company was started because the idiot son that inherited a business refused to upgrade to digital aerial mapping. He killed a 70 year old business. I am real glad he did, now I work for my own all digital company.

Give him a Holiday Gift: a copy of project management software - buy an old CD (or 5.25" floppies) for Win 3.0 or something and wrap it up real nice

Today's Dilbert, coincidentally.

https://assets.amuniversal.com/ac05a...0d005056a9545d

"your pisspoorplanning doesnt make it my emergency"
 

Who is the Construction Administrator? That’s who’s lap I would drop this in. Also ask him for authorization to bill for OT if they insist on expedited turn around.

I put it back on my subs all the time. Right now I have a contractor telling me I’m holding him on a particular issue. I asked him for 3 months for the submittal. He submitted it incorrectly (I’m pretty sure there’s no precast on my aluminum and glass building) so I rejected it but I did show him exactly what needed to be corrected.

The resubmittal took another 3 weeks despite several reminders and then came with a change order request for a perceived hardship now that he understood what the documents showed all along.

Today he’s asking for a status on the COR and tries to go on the record that it’s holding him up. So for the record, I reminded him why it’s a concurrent delay and therefore void.


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Everyone has big swinging balls from from behind a keyboard (or from a boardroom in my case), hell I'm guilty of it. I say this because all of the prior posters know damn well that poor planning on their customers part does absolutely constitute an emergency on your part. That's where the good money gets made, if you don't want a part of that world go work for a huge company or government. That way your urgent work and lackadaisical work will pay the same:)

where there is chaos there is cash :cool:

this is why I enjoy working freelance for clients in the big time world of motorsport ;)

Boom!!

In 2012 I saw the Mortgage lending business coming back to life, while it lay dormant for 4 years the bottom of the RE market was apparent, the prices were so low, people could actually get comps to work and buy houses. What was a 300K home was now a 60-80K home.

What changed for my business was the turn around time from when a survey was ordered to when it was needed. I attribute this to Email and internet being mainstreamed. An electronic signature on an ipad could now strike a deal on a home. No more hand delivering offers no more faxing then mailing, everything was speeding up.

At first I resisted, pissed off everyone needed me to rush everything, then I realized, evolve or die. I changed a lot of how I run my business and now cater to the people that need everything rushed, I am the go to guy for those situations.

I some cases an order has been made at 9 in the morning and we have had it delivered by 3 in the afternoon. The clients I have done that for? Loyal to the end, they will not even consider using a competitor because I bailed them out when then needed me the most.

I can whine all day long about all of them having piss poor planning, except they are happy to pay a rush fee, that makes me more money and keeps me very busy.

I love people who do not plan ahead and are disorganized, they are my best customers.

I used to catch hell from higher ups by INSISTING on a workable and APPROVED schedule and submittal plan prior to issuing the NTP. Young new executives initially would raise hell with me, but in the end they would always come around. Submittal processing and schedule had to be totally tits prior to cracking open the ground. It worked like a champ.

Two side notes, we never lost a claim and we gained a reputation to that effect.

No doubt that can be accommodated in some business/industries. But when you have multiple entities vying for the same review resource, those that properly planned will raise hell. It got so bad during the last boom that we discontinued doing "rush" reviews without council approval. It did not take long before the council discontinued that practice as well. All we had to do was inform the performers on who to hound to prevent their getting screwed because of the other developer's failure to perform.

This did not apply to unforeseen conditions, but only to known tasks.

The other issue was design by plan check. We killed that despicable act as well.

Panic and unplanned chaos are a nightmare in construction and the only people who benefit are the workers getting paid by the hour.

I have no problem with a rush job when I’ve bought it that way having paid premiums for quickship on equipment, the designer is on board with submittal reviews to expedite approvals and I’ve made subcontractor selections based on their ability to staff a project working 2 shifts and/or weekends.

But when delays create panic after the job is let out things like labor shortages, hopscotching sequence and the resultant lack of quality control are what will kill your reputation. Everyone forgets what happened in the first 98% of the project, you get judged on the last 2%.



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At times during the 3 decades I worked as a graphic artist, we had similar witticisms up on the wall just for laughs.

One was some cartoon character laughing really hard, eyes pinched shut, holding his stomach, with the words, "You want it when?" in large letters below.

The other one...

FOR RUSH JOBS,
ADD TWO WEEKS.

+1

I know a contractor who named his new ski boat “Change Order.”

Last week of the month, every month, for the last 25 years. Every muffler dragging cavalier, bald tired Hyundai, or rusted rocker panel pick up truck comes out of the woodwork, needing a state inspection today, right now. Can't wait till next week, because it is out of inspection, tomorrow.
They have 90 days to get it done, and every month, there are a handful of people blowing my phone up , trying to get on the roster asap.
I do not make more money because if it , so I don't jump anymore