Best Stand up Row With Your Boss

Nice one... maybe if more people had your sense, integrity and bottle, there wouldn't be so many collapsed building horror stories.

Del

A Gig at the old Hughes Co.

They sold a bill of goods to the Italian Gov as test equipment that gould fix their traffic light electronics using low skilled labor and red light green light, and some really lousy square wave patterns to send through the system.

My Boss was a Black Belt in Karate and was always doing practice moves. I was supposed to be impressed I guess, but it did not connect back then.

In my final report after I had everything worked and the full procedures to follow I carefully stated that though it was cosmetically working the actual ability of the test equipment to find real problems was nill. The test patterns were 100 and 1000 times less than the operating frequency of the circuit boards being tested. No way to really find a problem, it did not exist.

So I stood nose to nose to this genius and shouted the answer and did not back down on my assessment. The rest of the crew was in awe of me doing that, cause I was gonna get my B*T kicked for sure.

Innocent and Lucky I guess:

breeze block beats karate block every time was most likey something he probably never encountered in the dojo.

'da ber

Masu,

Please tell me what is meant by an hourglass failure. I have Googled several inquiries using different wording and get nothing that would resemble a credible answer (meaning any that reference failures with concrete pillars or beams).

I may not see your response, since I am not getting any followup responses to the initial CR4 postings.

not known about until recently? that is a debatable statement it comes along with the rest of the question like who was it known know about by.

a few years back a bunch of guys called sappers operating under the general site super named sal al hal haddein bought down a pretty heavily built building using that same concept. to a more recent situation the idea of using re-bar in vaults was shown to have the same effect when a hammering on the concrete and rebar properly would allow the walls to be popped open like a sqaushed pop can.

now if the french sound cannon is operating both the rebar and slumped concrete will be useless as a means of preventing hourglass entry.

'da ber

Very Interesting!!!

I have learned something today thus it is a good day.

Bill

If we are sharing simple stupidity here is a short story about a truly stupid boss.

I was a manager for a commercial HVAC company and we found somewhat of a niche in doing tenant improvements for medical offices. One of my property managers called and ask if I could meet her at a building that needed to be updated. There were three separate offices side by side that needed to be turned into two large offices. I informed my customer that my A/C design engineer was out of the country for another month and that I would not "wing" a design of the space. She told me to hire someone to complete the design work, mark the price up and send her the bill.

I hired a great engineering firm and after receiving their proposal I in turn marked up their proposed amount to my customer. My Vice President intercepted her approval fax and called me on the carpet. For over an hour my VP attempted to tell me how terrible I was and how undeserving I was to work for him. He spouted about how I was putting the company at risk if the equipment did not preform as advertised. I finally had to stand up and in my best adult voice tell him that all I did was hire a good firm to provide a finished product (stamped drawings), I marked that product up 35% and exchanged them for a check. He refused to allow me to bid on the remodel work and one of my best customers dropped the company from any future work. I have since left that company and have regained the customer's trust and all of their work.

The moral is if I had waited another 5 months my VP was let go for not producing enough profit to our headquarters.

Never give up and give in as little as possible.

Mike

The best way to advance the end, meaning play golf ASAP, is to never, but never be a yes man, when the boss says no, say no!

And after all is said and done, and when all is fully paid for, (green Fees,court ,caddy etc,) call me.

Wangito

Well Del and all, I'm on another computer and forgot my password. Nice thread. Most of my explosions went over the phone, but I did near come to blows with an Assistant Cameraman on a time sensitive shot for a scene involving a train. Once I was rowing around on the pond in the great garden trying to forget about how stupid the producers had been about fuel for the generator during a night shoot. I had repeatedly told them to get fuel for the generator. My Best Boy gave a PA 20 bucks from his own pocket and the ditz came back with donuts. The Diesel generator ran out of fuel. The night shoot ended. They called me and asked me why? From calm to throat popping neck vessels I went screaming, "How dare you ask me such a stupid question!" -I told you for three fucking days to get fuel into the generator! & "Fire me if you think you can finish your movie without me!" Can't remember what I said in the face to face instance, but I got the shot. It is sometimes an angry dance you have to do, but dangerous. What the hell, we have balls. One other time I left the ramp saying I was too angry to be safe. When a 707 dumped shit on me I didn't get angry, they let me go home and clean up.

Transcendian

PMSL..great post...
I can just picture that PA...
Del

Hello everyone,

The company I was working for built CEM shelters for power companies. The job I was working on involved about 6-8 people I supervised, building two of the largest shelters built at one time for one customer. The build had been going slow be cause the engineer was too busy trying to buy a house and not correcting his drawings. Part of my job was to keep the drawings updated "as built" and to correct for mistakes in drawings.

That could be inconsistencies in label names to any other problems on the drawings.

The engineer was to correct and reprint corrected drawings to be used. I had prints that took the engineer close to two weeks to correct.

Anyway My boss decided to have a "weekend work party" where he and all of the other crews about 25 people jumped on one project and "knock it out".

His second in command was all over me with questions about what was "I" doing all this time and Why was the drawings Not corrected!! ie the engineer doing his part.

The second and I had a melt down in front of the boss, it for my part almost came to blows with the second because before I could even start to answer the first question of the many he was spewing in accusations that I did not KNOW WHAT THE HELL I WAS DOING. I thought it better to remove myself from the area to cool off. We were inside one of the shelters at the desk and I felt he had me corner. To get to the door I had to either move him or a ladder. The ladder was the less violent way out.

The fool tried to follow me out of the warehouse all the time the boss is following both of us trying to stop what he though was fixing to happen. I was shouting over my shoulder to the boss to stop the second and let me cool off (nice way of saying it).

Any how after about 30mins to cool I went to find the boss to talk with him and to settle the dispute with him and answer the questions. The boss called the second in at that point and we ALL discussed what just had happen and and I finally got the answers out that the boss wanted.

After all said and done the second and I had a better understand of each other.

The boss told me he was sorry he had not listen to me about what had been going on earlier, and I had taken on more responsibility in the project than what I was supposed to have. AND he got on the phone and got the engineer down to the shop and tore him a new one for hanging his hat on me an the group.

In the end the second and I got along good, we actually worked good together in the areas I was weak he was strong and vise versa. The second was originally afraid I was trying to "take his job" Instead the the boss won.

Then a few months later the owner of the company sold off several of the divisions including this one. So we went our different ways.

I learned alot during that time about my self and handling people and supervising larger work groups. Before then the most I had supervised was three people at any one time.

metalSmith's

My boss was a good guy and once we'd both said our piece we went and played some golf!

Good separation of professionalism and personal.

Venting has to occur otherwise it builts up to a point it gets personal.

I worked at a company who's nephews where taking over. due to customers plant shut downs to work on the equipment which usaully happens on holidays, weekends and such.

These nephews were always unavailable which for the most part was a good thing, but they had the comapny credit cards.

One time ,,, hell twice I was called by the customer to take the first flight out to the west coast. could not get a hold of any of those pric#s. had to use my own credit cards, I was lucky I rarely used it and had $45,000.00 credit available on it. I was gone for a total of 5 weeks.

When I got back one of them took 2 weeks off vacation and the other was at work but made himself scarce.

I can't say I was civil with them, because they were there due to their blood line. And I let them know that in front of their uncle.

I had a boss one time that told me to trim 5" off a ASME stamped Boiler header. When I asked him if didn't think maybe we ought to ask the boiler co. engineer or at least look at a better set of drawings he got fighting mad and asked me If I WANTED HIS JOB? Well of course I said no I didn't and I would get right on it and went ahead and cut the header and made all the 5 or 6 fits that was needed to tie it all in. About 5 days later when we were trying to put a support on the piping and wondering why it wouldn't fit one of the Boiler co. engineers figured out someone had cut their header! They came straight to me and asked if I had cut that header and I of course told them I did. The next question out of their mouth was the one I had been waiting for: Why did you cut it? I replied by simply saying my boss told me to do it and although I knew it was wrong he didn't seem to want my opinion. LOL the next day I had to cut it all back out and weld the piece back in. The bad thing was that this was an X-ray job and we had to re shoot all of the welds yet again the second time. Well needless to say that boss never talked to me again after that. We got many good laughs off that crazy boss and his brain fart decisions over the years

pipewelder

Interesting stories!

While working in a limestone mine, a coworker, who had a serious anger problem, threatened to "kick my ass", I didn't respond but followed the proper procedure and informed the Superintendent. His reply was, "So what?" To which I reminded him of my record in the military, (Special Weapons and Logistics), and then told him, "If you handle it, he might get some help for his anger problem, if I handle it, I gonna solve ALL of his f***ing problems for him, and they will never find the body!!"

This is the same Super who after knowing my history called me a pussy one day. At the end of the day, I cornered him in his truck and told him that if he ever called me that again, I would show him why I'm registered with the local police and federal agencies and if he didn't like my attitude he had one of three choices: 1) he could fire me 2) he could meet out side the gate and we would settle it right then or 3) he could apologize.

He chose door number three.

Blue

I never had a row with a boss, but I did get by with talking back to one once.

I was working on a construction project to convert an empty discount store building into a tech school. One day the boss assigns me and another guy to remove the old adhesive used for the floor tile in one room. We used a solvent that contained xylene, and it produced fumes that had us dizzy-headed, but feeling gooooood! We went to the break area to sit down and let our heads clear. The boss came by and said we were goofing off. I said, "We're not goofing off, we're maintaining orbit!"

I just remembered a couple of other incidents that wile not technically rows with the boss are illuminating and somewhat humorous.

When terminating several thousand CAT-5 cables at a Krone frame made up of hundreds of the modules shown at right.

Now this is a very tedious job that requires concentration, accuracy and immaculate recording otherwise you end up with a mess that is almost impossible to sort out. The problem is that you are forever switching back and forth between record keeping and terminating which is not only time consuming and frustrating but extremely prone to errors.

I did a little experiment and found that by having two people terminating the frame, one terminating cables and the other doing the record keeping, you could cut the time needed by 75% and effectively reduce the error rate to zero.

Obviously using two people was the way to go especially as we were snowed under with work at the time and by using two people we could not only get the work done in a quarter of the time but effectively double the work the department could achieve.

Do you think I could get this blatantly obvious fact through to my dim-witted boss?

Not a chance in hell, all he would state was that we have too much work on and we can't afford to have two people working on the same job. I desperately tried to explain to him that we couldn't afford not to have two people working on the terminations for precisely the reason he was stating that we couldn't but it was all to no avail. The simple minded git just couldn't comprehend the time factor and get past the doubling of the hourly cost even though it meant a quadrupling of the work throughput.

The thing that really worries me about idiots like this is that they seem to survive. This particular Wally has been working in the same position for roughly two decades and still is over a decade after the incident I mentioned. Meanwhile anybody that has the slightest clue of what they are doing, myself included, has moved on to where their talents are not only appreciated but utilized.

I guess the adage that people rise through the ranks till they reach the level of their incompetence closer to the mark than many would like to admit.

On a lighter note and I have posted this before on CR4 but many of you will not have read it so here it is again.

When I was working as a cadet engineer I was involved in installing large computer control systems in skyscrapers. In this particular incident we were taking a single contact closure from a lift interface and converting it into a binary coded decimal signal that the computer used to indicate which floor the lift was on. In other words if the lift was on level 23 the BCD input for the tens would be 0010 and the input for the units would be 0011.

Now the senior engineer that I was assigned to had designed this incredible box of electronics that contained at least 30 CMOS IC with absolutely no input protection. Now one thing with lift interfaces and those huge DC motors they use is that there is going to be a considerable amount of noise on any signal cable coming from the lift control room. As a result the CMOS electronics lasted approximately 30 seconds before that horrible brown smell started to emanate from his box of electronics.

When we realized what had happened I said to my senior engineer that I had an idea that might solve our problem and that he should wait in the control room while I tried it. When I returned I had his box of electronics hidden in my tool box and instructed him to try it again and see what was showing up.

To his amazement everything was working perfectly and when he asked what I had done I handed him his box of fancy electronics. The look of astonishment and confusion that came across his face was worth a million dollars and he just couldn't understand how I had managed to get everything working without his box of electronics.

What everybody had overlooked was the levels the lift actually stopped on. In this case it was level 1, 2, 4 and 8 which happens to coincide with the single BCD inputs of 0001, 0010, 0100, and 1000, so all that was needed was to tie the relay from level 1 to the unit BCD 2⁰, level 2 to 2¹ level 4 to 2² and level 8 to 2³. No electronics needed at all.

Boy was this senior engineer embarrassed, and while he outwardly treated the incident as a joke I don't think he ever forgave me.

That seems to be the case, They feel that the task is so simple by just logging, that it would not require (2) people. Probally because they are short sighted, close minded, or what ever.

But not only you get it done faster, you also mentioned that the accuracy increases too, Why is that so hard to get that accross? Its almost like putting your finger on their nose and pointed to the savings, like you would do with a cat to show them.

• Its almost like putting your finger on their nose and pointed to the savings, like you would do with a cat to show them.

Hmm, hadn't thought of that approach I must try it one day.

Then again, the average pet moggie would probably cotton on faster than some of the managers/supervisors I've had the misfortune to cross paths with.

Hello all, It could have been the manager was looking at the fact that they could get more money for the time one person was working than they could charge for two people.Even though two people could work faster and spend less time on one job. But they could not bill for two people doing the work.

Also call backs for additional "work" could be billed.

Some managers just can not see past the money. No matter how effect or time saving something maybe. Spend a dollar to save fifty cents.

metalSmith's

Some managers just can not see past the money.

I come into work at 4:30 AM, I stopped doing that when I turned 45, The phone was ringing as I sat down, it was a customer that had a seal blow on his emulsifer. He did not know where to go and it was critical to get it running ASAP. A tour was coming through at 10:00.

I had some contacts, (nowadays its called networking) and I knew he comes in a 6:00. I called him and they had one on the shelf less than 20 miles away from the customer. it was $150.00.(with our 30% sales commission, and we did not have to touch it) I called him and relaided the info. Was he happy.

The owner of my company came in at 8:30 AM, I gave him the update. He said we could get it for $15.00 cheaper at where we usaully buy it. and to cancel the first order. I told him it was too late, we agrued for only 5 minutes, on the way out of his office, I mentioned that his supplier probally did'nt even have it on the shelf, other than not even in the same state delivery would be a day atleast. He ended up calling his supplier, to throw it back in my face, only thing is, they did'nt have it stock.

Nothing worst that agruing over something that already happened or made a difference.