Mood: I feel...entrenched?
Music: Accidents Will Happen, Elvis Costello
Game: World of Warcraft (60 Rogue, 15 Priest, 6 Warrior :)
Book: Sandman, Neil Gaiman.
Muffin: Raspberry-Mango.
Punchline: "Do you believe in miracles? YES!"
Feeling some better. Started putting pans of water around the apartment to get some humidity in the air until I get a humidifier this weekend.
Watched Miracle last night. Amazing story. Interviews with these guys indicate that Brooks was a huge prick. You can always complain about the methods...but the man was a genius. And undoubtably, the ends justified the means. They were prepared for that encounter...which is the point of coaching.
Today, I'm working on part of a claim. In construction, if things go batshit, largely through no part of your own, it is expected that you put in a claim for additional money. In this particular case, things went way more than batshit, and the project ended up costing over twice projected amounts. This is no small claim.
Anyway, the general contractor, the folks responsible for tying this whole project together, and the person you often blame for things going batshit, is being particularly intractable. They KNOW things went bad, they allowed all sorts of claims from other contractors, and now, probably because they spent all their money, they're being hardassed.
We're now facing a claim consultant whose job seems to be to try to prevent us from getting any additional monies for the headaches. Truthfully, things were as bad on this site as I have EVER seen...people working in foot-wide spaces alongside people wedged in corners, materials and rubbish piled up a foot deep on every available space, complete lack of coordination (one instance so bad, they literally placed structural steel smack in front of an access door so that the door couldn't open, made funnier by the fact that there was a raised concrete access hatch in the same location, so that the door wouldn't have opened even if the steel weren't there,) people welding a few feet from other workers...just horrific. And that was a result of them knocking 3 months off a year long schedule before anyone even hit the site. Bad.
Anyway, we're putting together something called a "measured-mile" analysis...in which you compare the estimate vs. actual of a "control" scenario that works the way it should have gone, and compare it to the EvA of the insane scenario.
As you can imagine, the dredging up of daily work data is tedious...and difficult, because people get yanked around a lot. It would be good if they started a job and worked on it all day. But it never works like that, especially on a site that's gone mad. You start here, find yourself blocked by pipefitters after an hour, go up two floors (waiting 30 mins to remobilize gear and men) do 2 hours of work you stopped yesterday due to sheetrocking, break for lunch, go back to the place you were originally working, get another hour done there, get sent down to pick up material...you get the idea.
Anyway...I'm trying to analyze what amounts to 15 months of day by day electrician work logs...trying to figure out what each electrician did every day.
This is what we call a "non-trivial exercise."
It pretty much sucks...but the amount of money that's involved, there's not much that's more important than this right now.
Oh well.
Posted by Glenn at March 11, 2005 01:07 PM