Contractor job site disagreement

Not really a disagreement, but I solo staked some things after being out of school for less than a year and the contractor called the next day saying something was messed up.  I was thinking uh oh, did I already screw something up?  The senior PC went out to check my work and when he got back to the office he was walking by my desk and I asked what happened.  He just goes "Those guys are idiots" and kept on walking.   

Funny how all the blame falls back on the Surveyor in every layout situation and that our stakes are wrong because the laser says it is.  It obviously has noting to do with the slope dialed in or the target, let alone the last time the laser was serviced, right?

We pinned footers for a homeowner once.

I got a call on a Sunday that our work was F'd up and the pre-fab ISO Walls were coming Monday morning. Pretty upset guy. Called my partner, and headed to the site, 35 minutes away. Got there, he was drinking and running string line between our nails. While i was calming him down, my partner jumped in the hole and in about 30 seconds yells up, FIXED IT ! Yep, on two of the short jumps he flopped the string.

He was pretty apologetic and did pay for the time .  

Contractor disagreements in my past are legion. 

The last one happened about 10 years ago, got a call from the concrete guy telling me a stake was bad.

Got to the site and the stake said C1.62' TBC. It should have said C1.26'.

Sometimes the contractor is a good guy. If he wasn't they could have gone ahead and cut out the dirt, poured the curb, charged for a change order and we would have had to eat the inflated cost. 

There are good ones and bad ones. 

@gary_g Our procedure was always

1. Set the nails.
2. Check the nails.
3. Take the foundation plans and paint the wall configuration at every nail (especially where interior walls met the perimeter)  

My favorite was always when a client would stand in the middle of a line of stakes and tell you that they are crooked.  Then I would tell them to stand at one end and look again and have a good day.

@james-fleming Yea, my expectations were a bit high.

@jflamm I have to admit, I’m guilty of trying to set stakes as straight as possible just for appearance sake. I know, I’m too meticulous for my own good sometimes. At least I don’t measure gap between the ribbon and top of the stake yet.

Long ago I staked a foundation for a new church, from which the footings were poured.  After the footings were in, I was asked to do a grade check.   After checking and rechecking what I did, I told the construction foreman that the footings were exactly one foot high.  Of course he didn't believe me so he had his guys check what they did.  I watched...   They transferred the grade for the footings, from the benchmark, using a stick (appeared to be a 2x2) with a couple nails in... nails that were exactly one foot apart....  🙂   

They made it work instead of pulling the footings.  I remember that each time I drive past that church and think...hmmm, they could have lowered that building about a foot.  

Property owner is with me. We found his front pin and now are looking for the rear pin. I'm using the schonstedt. He tells me I should be looking about 3 feet left of where I am. It is where he is standing. I ask him why should it be there. He says because he is looking at the front pin and it is a straight line to where he is standing. I ask him to move over 6 feet. He does. I ask if it is a straight line to the front pin. He says yes. Then gets this sheepish look on his face. The bells go off. I said it would be a straight line anywhere you were standing wouldn't it.

Once when checking the slope of a pipe there was a great difference between the level results and the design. The contractor had set a laser level in the downstream manhole and dialed in the slope correctly. However there was a huge front loader back filling around the same manhole and tamping with the bucket. Every time the bucket went boom, the laser level was sliding around.  

@on_point 

I'm constantly reminded that I'm not building a clock or a nuclear reactor...

unless we are....

@jitterboogie General contractor in a large meeting "We are not trying to build a Rolodex" I think Rolex was the word he wanted.

With less than two years surveying I got made party chief on a large subdivision project southeast of Denver. Staking for two phases was a stressful time trying to keep up. Tri-con Kent was moving dirt on one phase and Peter Kiewit was installing sewer lines on another. If not for the PK monster trenching machine constantly breaking down I would have been overrun. On a day my boss came out to check on things the PK foreman, who constantly challenged the quality of staking against his laser, came screaming down the line that they had just ran into a huge concrete structure in the path of the sewer line. It was a 20,000 lb. thrust block on the main water line for the Denver/Aurora water supply. As we walked up to look at it I noticed the 8' offset stakes were about 28' from the trench at the structure. "Someone must have kicked my laser" was his excuse. It seemed pretty negligent to me that no one on his crew had noticed the diverging line of stakes every 25 feet. 

I was relieved and the foreman and I got along a little better after that.  I pegged his laser frequently for him for the rest of the project. That became a regular practice in my career to peg and adjust contractors equipment from hand levels to lasers when working on construction projects.

Anyone else got any good stories about disagreements with contractors on the job site? 

A contractor called and said my offsets were off by a couple of feet.

So I go out to the site; he hooks his 25' tape to my 20' offset hub, walks down the 1:1 slope and says see, it's about 27', while holding the tape as high above his head as he can.

My response was something like; weird, I didn't think you were new to this...

And the classic is the slope stakes:"They don't line up!"

I had a "contractor" tell the engineer that my slope stakes were wrong. I had checked the stakes and they were correct. 

We met onsite and the engineer who has a fiery personality got out of the truck and told the contractor to show him what wrong. 

The contractor sent his guy with a rod to the stake and with a hand level took a measurement while standing near the edge of the existing road, then the guy with the rod walked to the centerline as the contractor spun around and took another reading, you could see his feet sink at least a couple of tenths as he turned. The engineer looked at me and waved me off and said "see ya, I'll take care of this" I drove off. 

I was "blue topping" a freeway grade, we were in a sharp curve with an 11% cross slope. Things started out ok but then as we got further into the curve we were having to leave the hubs up further and further. The contractor came driving down the grade in a big cloud of dust and got out of his truck hollering that we caused him to overcut the grade and now had to bring in rock to get things back to the proper grade and that he was going to get me fired.

As you would expect we rechecked everything and even the slope stakes he was using and I just couldn't figure out what went wrong. The grade checker was standing behind the very upset contractor with a look that said "boy, you are in big trouble". I then asked the grade checker if I could look at his hand level and checked it against the level we were using. Sure enough, the hand level was way off.

the grade was to low by about a foot in the steepest part of of the cross slope.

I don't think I ever saw that grade checker onsite again.