Difficult Customer

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jmellc

Senior Member
Location
Durham, NC
Occupation
Facility Maintenance Tech. Licensed Electrician
I recently helped a few days on a coworker's job.

This was a fairly small job that should have been relatively quick & easy but not so at all.

There were a few small physical challenges with methods of routing cables and having to move things in another tenant's basement below to run conduit there. But the main challenge was the customer, a GC. Their main project manager was OK but several partners over his head were constantly making changes. They also got hung up on the cost of fire rated floor boxes & kept pushing us to get new quotes. All quotes were within about $200 of each other, for 3 kits. A set of prints only showed up for the first inspection. Until then, the PM worked from a laptop drawing and we had to go to him to look at it, if he wasn't doing something else. We started off with 2 wall mounted TV's, and wound up with 7. 2 treadmills were wanted, but the rooms for them kept changing. A beer keg cooler was part of it too, a foolish item for an office IMHO. On top of it all, the main partner kept complaining we were not finished yet, even as he was making further changes.

I understand a wishy washy customer when it is a flaky college professor or a housewife who doesn't do these things very often. I do not understand such BS from a general contractor. A GC should know better than anyone the value of making a plan and sticking to it.

I don't yet know how it came out but I think we should have told them at the start to call us back when they decided what they wanted. This was a foolish way to do a job and they should have known better.
 
PITA trainwrekers should be Fired

If you didn't track change orders, nows the time.

If they don't like it then breach of contract lets you fire them and move on to better clients
 
jmellc said:
A beer keg cooler was part of it too, a foolish item for an office IMHO.
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In my younger days I would have thought that every office should have one. But there is a down side. At times your insurance doesn't like the idea of "any" sort of alcohol at a commercial business. Letting people drink on your property can be a liability and I hope he isn't going to be a pig and drink it all himself.
 
growler said:
In my younger days I would have thought that every office should have one. But there is a down side. At times your insurance doesn't like the idea of "any" sort of alcohol at a commercial business. Letting people drink on your property can be a liability and I hope he isn't going to be a pig and drink it all himself.
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Back when. We drank beer, road three wheelers, and partied hearty at the bosses every Friday night and on an occasional weeknight. Worked our butts off during the day, and did I mention drink beer afterwards? Loved working there.

I would love to have a beer after work with my crew, but just can’t. I don’t want the added responsibility and certainly don’t want anyone hurt. Dang we had fun though. Yea, we were lucky.
 
I've fired plenty of clients. It's a sigh of relief every time, too. Life's too short to work for a-holes.

Beer cooler is in the truck. Two bags of ice get added at every fuel stop, and I put a real garden hose drain on it with a valve.
 
ramsy said:
PITA trainwrekers should be Fired

If you didn't track change orders, nows the time.

If they don't like it then breach of contract lets you fire them and move on to better clients
Click to expand...

Fortunately it is T&M so we don't lose money but it has put other jobs behind & frustrated all who worked on it.

Some of us are discussing with the boss how to head off issues like this. The GC is someone we've worked for before and mostly worked OK together, but this job is their own office they are building and they are somehow going crazy with it.

I think we should have the right to stop the job when someone gets that crazy. I'm going to ask about doing that. I would always call the boss first before taking such action though.
 
drcampbell said:
I once worked at a CB radio shop (yeah, I'm THAT old) with a pop machine in the lobby. The column labeled "out of order" was stocked with beer.
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The vending machine area at the Stanford AI lab back in the late 60's (The Prancing Pony, of course) had one of the rotating cylinder and sliding door multiple price machines that was interfaced with the main computer (PDP10) so you could either put in coins or charge the food to your account using an adjacent teletype. One row was beer, and its price was set to an odd number of cents but the machine did not accept pennies. So the only way you could buy beer was on your account and you had to be legal drinking age to do that.
 
Years ago I saw somewhere that Anheuser-Busch breweries had water fountains on their premises that were fed from beer tanks.
 
growler said:
In my younger days I would have thought that every office should have one. But there is a down side. At times your insurance doesn't like the idea of "any" sort of alcohol at a commercial business. Letting people drink on your property can be a liability and I hope he isn't going to be a pig and drink it all himself.
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better if he did. if you had a "designated drinker" drunk under the
table, there might be some people left in the office not drunk.
 
jmellc said:
Fortunately it is T&M so we don't lose money..
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Perhaps fool ideas of cost efficiency & construction experience are getting in the way, interfering with the prevailing whims of the real architects.

Don't shut-down T&M job. Bosses custom castle needs your best talent (Apprentices) billed at highest rates. Tell Bosses you got rid of problem children, and dispatch some others to next job, perhaps keeping a familiar favorite, or your personal attention with Bosses new castle.
 
retirede said:
In Germany, the slots with beer are marked “Beer”.
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In the late 1980's in Bitburg, Beer was a living organism that populated my gut with diverse organisms, and appeared to be treated like food.
In the States, Beer is treated like pure alcohol, perhaps since pasteurization (cooking) kills all living organism in bottles & cans.
The export version of Bitburger Pilsner sold in the States is also pasteurized, has no head, and is less of a digestive experience.
 
growler said:
In my younger days I would have thought that every office should have one. But there is a down side. At times your insurance doesn't like the idea of "any" sort of alcohol at a commercial business. Letting people drink on your property can be a liability and I hope he isn't going to be a pig and drink it all himself.
Click to expand...

Oh, in my younger days, I sneaked a beer or 2 sometimes and smoked a bit of weed at various hiding places on the jobs. I did have the partial excuse of being young & foolish at the time. I never had a boss offer me alcohol or drugs on a job. When I worked in an office, we had the occasional luncheon or office party where alcohol was served but it was never a daily provision.
 
ramsy said:
In the late 1980's in Bitburg, Beer was a living organism that populated my gut with diverse organisms, and appeared to be treated like food.
In the States, Beer is treated like pure alcohol, perhaps since pasteurization (cooking) kills all living organism in bottles & cans.
The export version of Bitburger Pilsner sold in the States is also pasteurized, has no head, and is less of a digestive experience.
Click to expand...

Bitburger was one of the brands I frequently saw in vending machines.

“Bitte, ein Bit”
 
retirede said:
Bitburger was one of the brands I frequently saw in vending machines.

“Bitte, ein Bit”
Click to expand...

In a vintage WWII film, I noticed a crew member on a German U-Boat holding a Bitburger.
Probably the same brew made today, with perhaps a little extra JP8 jet fuel mixed in from Bitburg airfield.

"Abends Bit, morgens fit!"
 
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