Weekend Warrioring

You wouldn't believe it, but I actually like working Saturdays. Construction sites are busy, hectic and fast-paced, and during the typically weekday day, I'm too busying running around answering questions and dodging blame to actually get anything done. During the week I don't have time to do the things I'm supposed to. Saturdays, I kind of can.

Unfortunately, this Saturday, the task I had to do involved walking every single room of the two floors I'm running. Fourty seven rooms a floor, so I had to walk in almost 100 rooms. And what was I doing? Checking to see if walls were painted.

Yes, on a site this big, it's actually possible to miss painting entire walls. And actually, it's not that uncommon to miss building entire walls. My very first project with this company, we built an office with a full commercial kitchen. The kitchen was supposed to have glass tile on all four walls. No one, not my boss, not his boss, picked up on it. We'd only painted it. Which is unfortunate because the tile was supposed to keep the kitchen, with five sinks, waterproof. No one noticed until the day before the company was supposed to move in. And even more oddly, no one cared. No one complained, no one was mad, so we just slapped some waterproof paint on it.

I didn't find any unpainted walls today. Well actually one, but that's cause we'd just added an inch to it. But that wasn't the only thing I was checking for. I had a lovely little list of fourty items per room to check for and had to mark them in spreadsheet so my boss could know our level of completion in every room.

Floor tile, shower glass, ceiling moulding, all the good stuff. I had to walk through every single room and put in x in a box to mark it done. Fourty items, fourty boxes, two floors. I knew my hand would be seriously hurting if I had to 3200 checkmarks.

Luckily I didn't have to. My floors are quite far behind.

See you Monday

Maybe we should work on the ark instead

About three weeks ago, My boss and I were walking with our plumber, when we got to talking about turning the water on the building. We had to replace the existing main running into the building with a much larger one, and so the hotel had basically been without water for a year.

"I guarantee you," our plumber said. "When we turn the water on, there'll be no leaks."

There's a saying in construction that if you've ever met a plumber who told you he's never had a leak, he's a liar. We're not very witty with our sayings.

We decided to play it safe and only turned on three risers (there's over forty in the building). So, of course, I spent my entire day running around with a walkie-talkie. "Water here, water there. Water coming out of that wall. I don't even know how there's water there."

All told, we found seven leaks in those three stacks, which I guess is a 233% failure rate. I wish I could say that's unbelievable, but apparently in construction, everyone's okay with plumbers not being able to their job (the picture in the blog title is of me vacuuming up water from a flood on a previous project).

After several hours, we'd had enough and turned the water off. I'm not sure what the plan is from here on out. It's either going to require fixing a great number of holey pipes or hotel guest will just be showering with hope.

Of course, not all these were our plumber's fault. The worst one, well, we cut open the wall to find it, and we found a PVC pipe sawed in half. Someone working there was cutting something next to it, slipped, and chopped the pipe in two. Apparently they thought this would not be a problem and closed up the wall.

No, nothing wrong with gallons of water spewing out inside a wall on the fourth floor while six people are standing at a faucet on the tenth wondering why there's no water coming out.

Just an average Friday.

And what's that?

Well it typically involves working Sundays. Like every Sunday, every week.

But that's not all that goes in to being a bitch for one of the biggest construction companies in DC. Oh there's quite a lot, which is what this will be all about. But first, what you first need to know.

I work as an assistant superintendent with one of the five largest construction companies in the DC Metro area. I am in the construction industry out of sheer laziness. As in English major, I couldn't tell a screwgun from a verb, but I worked for the company one summer pushing a broom and they just kept offering me jobs. I didn't have to look anywhere, so I didn't.

The construction industry is basically a clusterfuck of uneducated people and assholes, who are usually one in the same. Actually almost always.

A month ago I got thrown into one of the largest projects going on in DC, a $70 million dollar renovation of one of the city's oldest hotel. My company has over 20 people working on the project, and I am currently 20th in both rank and likability. I constantly get bitched and blamed for things that one, have no merit and two, no point. The latest is that two guys, 15 and 14 in my own personal company power rankings, frequently complain to our boss that I leave the lock off our private port o' potty. I don't, but even if I did I don't understand the ramifications of someone else pooping in our personal stall. Perhaps all hell will break loose. Probably not.

And this is just a brief smattering. The hotel's slated to open June 7th, 87 days from now. I'd like to give you 87 stories of the innane life that comes from working 7 days a week with people that can barely count to three but are expected to build an 11 story, 5-star hotel in under three months.

Wish me luck, but wish them luck more.