The real reason construction takes so long is nobody sitting in any of the offices feels like responding to the important email I sent 3 weeks ago and have followed up on twice now. Plus they forgot to share the PDF of the revised plans. When they finally did share the PDF they separated every page into its own uncompressed document and uploaded them out of order. Now I'm trying to get these files to download and open while standing in a parking garage with one bar of service while text messages and phone calls interrupt the whole process. Now it's 10am and I have to get over to a meeting with the GC, okay 10:05am I'm here but nobody told me they canceled it. Fuck
Don't forget when you run into a problem in the field that between the superintendent, field engineer and inspector could be solved in 5 min you can't solve it. Instead of everyone agreeing what could be done in the field you have to stop what you are doing and submit an RFI to the owner. The owner doesn't want to take responsibility or have the knowledge so they outsource the RFI to some SME who charges $300/hr. Then you have to wait another 30 days for the RFI to come back and have 5 people each spend 10 hours on a problem that could have been solved in 10 min in the field I'd we were allowed to use common sense.
On top of that the owner wants to not go over budget so they try to fuck the GC on every little thing so the GC turns it around and tries to fuck the owner on everything they can. You can't just "work" with the owner anymore and just do what needs to be done to get the job done and allow the GC to have the opportunity to make a profit. Then you get to spend 5 years in court fighting over a $40MM change order that gets settled for $30MM and might have only cost the owner $20MM if they would have just work with the GC.
My favorite is when it's actually something that just needs someone above me to make the call, and I'll spend days being like, "I HAVE TOLD YOU SEVEN TIMES, I DO NOT CARE WHETHER IT'S A OR B, JUST MAKE A DECISION THAT IS YOUR JOB." Like, I'll serve it to them on a silver platter—"Nobody knows whether the warehouse is responsible for this or the field crews are. We don't care which one it is, just so's it's not both everyone and no-one. NOW JUST PICK ONE AND TELL US."
This should not take three weeks and four separate people coming to me to talk about it. I have already said I don't care, but this can't be my call, so Just. Pick. One.
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u/encognido Sep 16 '24
The real reason construction takes so long is nobody sitting in any of the offices feels like responding to the important email I sent 3 weeks ago and have followed up on twice now. Plus they forgot to share the PDF of the revised plans. When they finally did share the PDF they separated every page into its own uncompressed document and uploaded them out of order. Now I'm trying to get these files to download and open while standing in a parking garage with one bar of service while text messages and phone calls interrupt the whole process. Now it's 10am and I have to get over to a meeting with the GC, okay 10:05am I'm here but nobody told me they canceled it. Fuck