Documentation

dayexco

ladies and gentlemen...i'm a real stickler on documenting things...via digital pictures, videos, daily diary, and audio recordings....today, it saved my ass....did a job a year ago where the engineer called my precast concrete supplier AFTER he approved shop drawings, realized he'd made a bad mistake, and changed a lift station design. he never told me, i never received any addendums, new shop drawings, etc. i'm P O'd at my supplier for not getting back to me before he made the change...ANYWAY!!!, the precast comes in, the crane is sitting there to take it off the truck and drop it into the hole. 18" DIP openings, etc....and it's all fugged up, and we had to be "creative" now to make things fit. i'm scratching my ass and my head on how we'll make this work....thanks to my son, we got it done...but, BEFORE we started this mess in field...i insisted that the engineer's tech on the job, call the P.E. responsible for the changes, and give the tech the authority to sign off on what we were doing, asking him to accept it, or reject it...."had he rejected it, the precast was custom built, would have to be thrown away, and the engineering company would have to bear the cost. this job is a year old, they were still sitting on my retainage "10%"...i drug out both sets of drawings, got ahold of a copy of the addendum i'd never seen, digital pics of the precast as delivered, what we had to do to make it work, phone logs of calls made to the engineer's office, guess what? they approved a nice little change order in my favor...i'm done rambling here. all i'm saying is DOCUMENT, DOCUMENT, DOCUMENT!!!!!

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someday, i'll be as patient as Nick.

denick

Boy day,

Could you bottle some of that and send it my way. I know the importance of documentation and even know how I should do it. But in the heat of the moment it just gets forgotten 50% or more of the time.

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Nick

"Every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving" Albert Einstein

dayexco

denick,
i have a canon sd-400 that is smaller than a pack of smokes, it's in my pocket all day long, the pictures are free, i have a gig chip in it, i can even take small videos if need be. i got sick of getting at the end of jobs and having it be a "he said/they said" scenario....i scan all my phone bills and stick them in the job file, any correspondence goes into the file. if they call, the first thing i ask them if they acknowledge they're being recorded, and that audio file goes into that job file. i just got tired of getting burnt on stuff. we can all smile, agree until it comes time to pay. that's where you have to have proof.

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someday, i'll be as patient as Nick.

denick

The other day I had the thought that you hadn't posted any pictures of jobs lately. You've been keeping them for yourself, huh!

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Nick

"Every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving" Albert Einstein

dayexco

hahaha, well a lot of the pics would bore people, they're close ups, relevant to the immediate thing we're dealing with. i'm not a photographer standing off the side trying to get the best view to throw into some advertisement. here when it slows down next month, i'll go through some of the files, and post some that maybe take in the whole project.

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someday, i'll be as patient as Nick.

rino1494

Glad your ass was covered. Could have been a real costly mistake.

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Life is hard. It is harder when you are stupid

Uncle Sam wants YOU....to speak ENGLISH

dayexco

denick, i don't know if you've ever clicked on the link at the bottom of all must posts. there are a lot of my pics at that photobucket site.

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someday, i'll be as patient as Nick.

MC Excavating

Heres some advice I once recieved. "If it isnt in writing, it didnt happen." Even if you need to get someone to approve a field change order written on a napkin.