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What's the dumbest survey you've ever done?
jim’s condo alta thread got me to thinking.
national retailer of camouflage-lifestyle oriented products opened up here about 10 or 12 years ago. they did the usual, which is to say they plied several local communities for incentives to build and picked the suburb that gave away the most farm for the privilege- which in this case happened to be on the order of 80 years of tax abatements.
anyways, as a condition they had to employ so many locals and- here’s where I come in- dedicate a minimum of 25% of their floor space for “public education”. keep in mind we’re talking about a store. a store that has lots of dead animals in it, but still a store.
so it became a condo regime. one unit was retail, one was education. and the units had to be contiguous. now many of you have likely been inside one of these stores, and understand that the dead animals don’t all hang out together- or even on the same floor. I had to figure out how to make them all contiguous.
did the standard taping of interior walls, measuring the animals’ various bedrooms, etc, then we shot all the tiled walkways and staircases that traversed between the ladies camouflage bloomer department and the candy aisles and the fishin rods and you get the idea.
oh- there were to be no common areas, and the education area could not contain more than 50% of the walkways. spent about a month scratching my head every day trying to squeeze out a square foot or three from a closet or a bathroom just to get up to 24.51%, as I’d at least convinced those with say-so to capitulate that far. I was done- couldn’t make it happen. stuck at like 24.46%, there was no more land I could steal.
drove down there one afternoon just to look at it one more time. found myself at some point standing in front of the elevator. there it was. i needed maybe 12 square feet or something. taped the inside of the elevator, halved the area, added the opening: 16 square feet.
the documents were the single most ridiculous thing I’ve ever generated. about 9 zillion calls each, and the sketches looked like an earthworm orgy. I’ll have to look them up on line when I get to the office tomorrow.
Best part of the whole thing: economy crapped out in ’08, they laid off a bunch of people, went under their minimum, and lost their tax abatements.
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