Hard work, made harder

We were three weeks from handover on a luxury apartment complex and the taps didn’t work. They were designed for a pressurised system and the one we’d put in wasn’t pressurised. Meeting called.

In troop the client, his project manager, the architect, the contractor (us) and the subcontractor.

The project manager demanded to know whose fault it was. We batted that around for half an hour until the ball rolled into the subcontractor’s corner, where it stayed, because they were the bottom of the food chain.

“Right,” said the project manager. “You put those taps in. It’s down to you.”

The subcontractor’s MD fumed in silence. At the next meeting he produced a thick dossier which, he said, proved the taps were what the architect specified. He’d had his whole team compiling that dossier all week.

The architect started to argue.

Then somebody asked, “Does anybody know how to fix this problem?”

After a few seconds a site foreman raised his hand, cleared his throat and said: “Uh, yeah, we’ve seen this before. If you remove the washers from the taps they work okay.”

Not ideal, but people could move in. We’d fix it after.

Work is hard, but sometimes we make it harder than it needs to be.