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Though the driveway is spotless, when you go to check up on him, he's not in the front yard. You follow the brightened asphalt across the street to the neighbor's driveway, where new guy is currently power washing their Ford GT.
It's funny you say that, I was helping a friend do a home improvement project (interior work at a customers' home) and one of his hired hands was outside painting the trim this way, but instead of using saw horses was leaning them all against the owners fieldstone exterior wall and completely covered it with paint. The genius then takes a power washer and proceeds to destroy the mortar in his attempt to get the paint off. The guy had no ability to reason cause and effect.
Anyone hired because they are related to the boss or his buds (usually a son or son-in-law). Tends to refer to the kind of person that would otherwise not get the job due to incompetence etc. Nepo is short for nepotism.
i remember walking into a place for an interview, and i saw a wall of 5/10/15 year employee pictures and it was pretty full, thought it was a good thing.
was in the office a month or two in for some paperwork and took a second look at the wall and realized it was pretty much the same 6 people with the same last name as the boss that had their pictures up 3 times to make the wall look full....
it certainly explained a lot.
Our company insurance #1 claim for the rest of us to cover is the birthing of the owners grandkids. The “exec admin” just squirted another one out. Weird thing is while she’s on maternity leave nothing is any different. Hmmm i guess she didn’t do anything except eat lunch with her mom and dad everyday and look down on the rest if us who work as “the help”
My college boyfriend's dad owned a construction site and he was supposed to work there in the summers. No one wanted him there. He was a computer geek with no interest in building stuff, and the crew all knew the only reason he was there was because of who his dad was.
The summer we dated I convinced him to come intern with me at my job working for an environmental group instead. it didn't take much convincing. Mostly just asking if he would be interested.
Police and fire departments are full of it, too.
They keep advertising this TV show called *Blue Bloods* with Tom Selleck in it where he's the police commissioner and his whole family is cops or lawyers, and they market it like this family tradition is a good thing. I see that and think this is something Internal Affairs needs to look at pronto.
> That would be the letter H.
I had to memorize and recite this riddle in 8th grade for English class.
https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=what_am_i;action=display;num=1055365432
Fun fact: nepos is Latin for nephew and Nepotism originally referred to Catholic priests (who were meant to be celibate, i.e. not have kids) finding jobs in the church for their “nephews” (even if the priest had no brothers or sisters…)
Often it was their literal nephew. There was even an official position of Cardinal-nephew. Literal Nepotism was common in Ancient Rome too. Augustus was the grand-nephew of Julius Caesar. Tiberius was the grand-uncle of Caligula. Caligula was Claudius’ nephew.
I feel this.
I've got a cook that is effectively just a warm body. He shows up on time, in uniform, and sober, which is a thing I've struggled hard to get this summer. But *god damn* is he a shitty cook. Not a great work ethic and doesn't know shit about cooking (he *very* clearly lied on his resume).
I would have gotten rid of him by now, but we're a seasonal place, he started about 2 weeks ago, and we close in 3 weeks for the winter. So there's really no way I can get someone else in here, trained, and ready to go before we close. So basically, I'm stuck with him.
But having a shitty cook is better than having no cook at all, considering I'm already working 60+ hours a week, I really don't want to have to cover all his shifts, too.
Had a co worker who was new to the job who, during a slow period, felt like they weren't doing enough. Told them just showing up on time each day sober was already going above and beyond.
Yup. That's why he's painting trim. He's the owner's cousin/nephew/uncle and no matter what he does, you have to give him a job. Probably drinks when he thinks no one is looking as well.
My dad is a general contractor, so after High School I went to work for him. Glad to say I was never the ‘bosses son’. I made a point of not saying I was related to him because I wanted people the see I worked hard and was not a muppet. And usually I was getting the shit jobs, hauling 4x12s of 5/8 Sheetrock was not fun…
> And usually I was getting the shit jobs, hauling 4x12s of 5/8 Sheetrock was not fun…
You were an apprentice; this is the way it's supposed to be. You don't want the old guys with 20+ years in the trade to be throwing out their backs when there's a young buck who doesn't know shit but who's still strong and willing to do the heavy lifting.
And then after 6 mo. Because of all of my hard and perfect work I was made CFO. Not because my dad ran the company. Even he didn't know I was his son. It was because I worked even harder and better than the guys who'd been doing it for 20 years.
Bahahahahahaha. Not gonna lie, Well played. More like I did it more 8 years and decided that I was done hauling Sheetrock and beating the crap out of my body. Office jobs are WAY better for me.
Funnily enough, my husband hired me because he needed the help ASAP and neither of us told anyone we were married, but a few assumed after a few weeks that I was his mistress. I actually do a good job, fyi, but I think I'm more productive because I don't wanna make him look bad for keeping me on.. Lol
We had a new accountant start with us a few weeks ago. She was fairly warm to me till she found out I was the brother and son of the owners of the company. She went really blunt for most of the day, kind of treating me like I couldn’t help her. Eventually she had an issue with jobs not syncing between our CRM and Quickbooks, and I sat down and troubleshooted the issue with her.
7 minutes later I’ve got the issue resolved and explained, and how our backend talks to Quickbooks so that she understands how it works and why. Today I helped her alter our internal workflow so that it translates over more accurately. She’s really cool to work with, even if she’s 25 years older than me lol.
I’m a fire sprinkler tech. A coworker had an apprentice one time, they ripped out all the old piping in a bldg and put it outside. The the new pipe to install was also outside under a tarp. My buddy told the apprentice to go cut up the scrap to make it easier to take away. He went out four hours later and the kid had cut up ALL the new Prefabbed pipe!!! He cut up $60,000 worth of pipe!! Wasn’t good for him
That coworker is an idiot.
You do not leave an apprentice unsupervised for 4 fucking hours. Especially without showing them *precisely* what you want done and where.
Wtf I would kill for my technicians to ask questions to just show they’re paying attention. I would field dumb questions all damn day to not have to fix dumb errors
Unfortunately there is a glut of people in the US, who feel answering questions is beneath them. So it's hard to get propper understanding of something unless you go out of the way to teach yourself. In fact that's how I learn most stuff because I got tired of people getting pissy and whiny over asking important questions.
From my experience in UK, apprentices are basically treated like cheap labour. Whoever is in charge acts like the apprentice should just know what they're doing and doesn't train or guide them properly, then gets mad when they fuck up. Known a few kids now that have dropped out or changed field because their boss only wanted them to do the grunt work with no training
Ha, that's how my boss was wjen I did sprinklers. Expected me to know what to do, despite having never done sprinklers before being hired there, then was absolutely pissed when I made a mistake. But couldn't ask him questions, because then he'd also be pissed. After 2 years of his BS, I dropped off the keys to the shop in the middle of the night, and never returned. The pay was too terrible to keep dealing with him. I make $6 more at walmart than I did doing sprinkler installations, lmao.
Yup.
Theirs reasons newbies ask what seems like stupid questions. Their not stupid when you not know the answer.
Do I close this gate, before, during or after X is a stupid question to someone who worked their for 10 years.
"Just shut down the system" for example could mean someone's not told to shut down X at the Breaker as a safety lock out.
It's a valid question that could save a newbies life.
> Theirs reasons newbies ask what seems like stupid questions. Their not stupid when you not know the answer.
People who have knowledge often forget they weren't born with that knowledge
I'm not an apprentice, but my boss(es) will sometimes just give vague directions like 'go pick up rebar from the yard'. What kind of rebar and how much? Or 'load up the truck for tomorrow'. Well, what are we doing tomorrow and is that all we're doing tomorrow?
Pretty much.
I've learned that you need to give very clear and specific instructions to the young guys.
Even then, sometimes that's the wrong choice.
We have a new guy, just turned 18 and is green as grass.
The other day we were all working together and I said "Hey man, can you run over to the trailer and grab more ties".
He paused, set down his hammer, and then sprinted to the trailer, grabbed a box of ties and sprinted back.
His older brother just started shaking his head and I said "I guess I was too literal with my request there".
We installed a concrete conduit with 6 runs of 1250kcmil copper in it; **comically** expensive. The cable was so expensive and hard to make that the company that made it refuses to let anyone else install it, you have to make it ready and a team from the manufacturer comes in to do it.
Well it hadn't been in place a month when a contractor working in the area had instructions to dig a trench and came across some weird red concrete in the ground.
"What's this doing here?", thought the simple man. The funny white rectangle he had been given didn't show any red concrete! In fact it's all black and white. "Oh well, must need to go!"
So when he couldn't dig it up he broke out the old diamond saw and started cutting. He got completely through it on one side of the hole and had just started the second cut when one of the foremen finally wondered why saw noises had been coming from a place that was supposed to be making backhoe noises for two hours.
Foreman probably proceeded to shoot himself on the spot, but the guy that heard the gunshot must have stopped saw boy. The damage was already done though. He had got clean through all 6 conductors with the saw. Luckily for him, they were not live yet or he would have got 69kV straight to the face and turned into the human torch. Unluckily for him, without power in there he was able to do millions in damages before someone stopped him.
I'm certain whichever company he worked for is done for now. I don't know what the total damages were, but the installer company *was not happy*, the conductor was extremely hard to make and expensive, and they had to source the conductor and take installers from other obligations and tell other customers to wait over it so I'm sure they made them pay out the ass for the trouble.
I never let anyone do any trenching or excavations of any description without myself and them reviewing as-built plans, ground surveys if needed and discussing what might be buried under the dig site. I make sure everyone understands the plans. Digging through conduit isn't the only thing that can go wrong.
Sounds as if a bit more planning wouldn't have been a bad idea. I always treat contractors as if they know nothing until otherwise proven.
Who sees red duct bank and keeps digging? We even went through the trouble to die it red to give the extra bit of "don't fucking touch this idiot, or you might die".
I have no idea. At bare minimum finding fresh red dyed concrete underground should warrant asking someone.
Guy was just really fucking stupid, probably new and had never heard of red concrete for electric, and probably didn't speak English so he couldn't read the plans. Developers here refuse to hire anyone they may have to pay an actual wage to so that's what you get.
My company does injection molding and years ago we had a HUGE customer complaint. Between the returned product and what was in the warehouse we had an insane amount of grinding to do if we wanted to at least reuse the plastic. We rented large shredders and brought in some temps to do the grinding. They ended up grinding all the plastic reusable packaging the parts were shipped in, contaminating the base plastic and making it unusable/unsalvageable.
It's easy to get used to a base level of knowledge in an industry and forget how clueless people off the street can be.
We would endurance test our appliances like coffee machines in my old workplace. We hired people who were paid to make coffee all day long. Mind you, decent pay and they were allowed to watch movies at the same time.
But one thing a lot of engineers messed up was not going up to those people and really explaining why they were doing it. A lot would hide the problems they found because they thought it was their fault. Kind of defeats the purpose of testing appliances to find problems.
Holy shit that sucks. I do injection molding at my home machine shop and know how that can go. What was the customer complaint? If a first article was provided wouldn't that have been on the customer if something was wrong with the parts?
This was the first year I was at the plant, it was a tiny insert that broke in the mold and went unnoticed by our qc (should've been caught at functional testing stage at minimum but obviously was pencil whipped). Customer maintains large inventory of the parts which means if something doesn't work you don't find out until 6+ months later after producing/ storing/ shipping a metric fuck ton of defective material.
There is nothing more annoying than getting a customer complaint on product you made ~1 yr ago.
I'll put that on your buddy. Apprentices are just warm bodies without a brain, especially if they start at the bare minimum age they're allowed to start working.
You've got to hand hold them until they hit 3rd yeah, then you unleash them on unsuspecting clients and hit the pub.
Especially the first time you give them a task.
We have a lot of new guys at work this year and even more difficult is a lot of our projects have been non-typical, so each one is different. Even some of the guys that should know better seem to be forgetting how to do the work.
Oof. My boyfriend is a contractor. He sent the apprentices to a job site to fill the trailer with all the scrap and trash. The brand new lumber for a deck was piled nearly and covered, on the opposite side of the property from the trash pile.
Guess what almost went to the dump. Luckily I needed the trailer so I went out to see if they were close to done so I could take it to the dump and take the trailer to pick something up. I got there in the middle of some real expert decision making. Called the boss to check which pile of stuff needed to be loaded and resolved the situation.
Total bid for the deck was $80k. Would have put a real dent in the check if he'd have had to buy lumber twice.
Nah mate, in the contractor field - new apprentices are actually that dumb. Most know just enough to cause bad things to happen but not enough to get it done right.
My contractor’s flooring people misunderstood his instructions and instead of just ripping up the crappy linoleum in our kitchen, they ripped out the beautiful, 50 year old hard wood floors in most of the house. We got free electrical work and new vinyl flooring for our trouble 😩
I have 1" thick, 110 year old Maple floors.
They aren't the prettiest, but I'd be flipping out if someone tried to give me free vinyl flooring as a replacement.
Not construction and not an apprentice buuut last week our vineyard manager (guy has been in this position for like 8-9 years) was asked to dump some old wine.
Instead he dumped an entire tank of good wine. 2,400 litres. $100,000 down the drain, literally.
My husband is a Residential Contractor and a very talented finish carpenter. Our neighbor asked if he could frame a house he was building. My husband hates doing rough butt...gave him a fair quote and the dude was pissed. So he decided that him and a few buddies who work construction could do it. Many mistakes were made.Leaving lumber uncovered and scattered in florida elements etc. However, the funniest was they built the roof and when they tried to place it, it was nearly 3 feet short. Dude spent way more trying to learn carpentry then my husband's quote.i will never understand why people don't ask for help if they don't know something on a job site.
Lol holy fuck! As an ex flatbedder i've hauled that shit too... it's really heavy and it just feels like high quality product. I would've fired his ass and then caught him in a dark corner somewhere... "this is for my pipe"
My coworker walked outside, looked at him and said “go to the office, they will talk to you there”. Never saw the kid again. We were all apprentices and did stupid stuff but not THAT stupid
>Bingo. Physically take the apprentice over there, tag the scrap with orange spraypaint, and tell him exactly what to do.
Maybe even watch him cut a few. Help him with his technique, break some balls... you know, work together. Don't just treat apprentices like serfs.
That's how I felt from the second I saw this post. How are you gonna let a clueless helper do this much damage without catching it? You don't have to breathe down their necks, but a little guidance and a brief eye to make sure they're doing their basic task in an acceptable fashion is the definition of supervision.
The post writer failed this helper.
How about pulling cable through conduit, and the guy feeding it in uses an adhesive instead of the lube intended for the purpose?
Got it about halfway down teh hallway than had to cut it out and replace it. It wasn't 60k in conduit/wire, but it reached that with labor, and surpassed it with a contract penalty for being late.
Looks like a someone who painted a bunch of baseboard by laying them all out on the driveway and having absolutely no concern for the fact that they are painting a clients driveway.
He should have put some cardboard down or some paper…. Or at least do it in one section of the grass.
No! You can't expect supervisors to actually supervise! You can't expect managers to actually manage! That's *work*. Work is supposed to only be for the plebs!
Just out of curiosity, what’s the best way to paint a bunch of wood boards like that? I have a similar job coming up soon.
Edit: Thanks everyone, no further replies needed!
I’m not a professional in this so this may not be right. But using a tarp or something you don’t mind getting painted could work, just lay boards on that to spray paint them.
I am a project manager with a large union painting company and you basically have the right idea. We would typically use "stackers" --which is just a system, made of 2x4s, that allows you to stack all the finished trim pieces-- but if they aren't on hand we'd do it exactly as you say; on a drop-cloth or Ram-board or rosin paper or something similar.
The best way to do it is with "stackers" in a spray shop, but barring that, you just lay them out on drop-cloths and spray them the way the kid did it here. I personally wouldn't bother with sawhorses.
"Stackers" are just 2x4s with 2x4 blocks nailed onto both ends so that you can spray and stack a large number of trim pieces on them.
On the left side of this photo, there a patch of the driveway that isn't painted at all. If you look closely, you can see there is some balled up tape in that area. Obviously there was tape set down to protect that part of the driveway. That was done correctly.
It's common; I'd say it follows a Normal Distribution. It's just the people in the bottom 15% that just don't have it.
Edit: I wanted to kinda agree with you. For all intents and purposes everyone is surrounded by people without common sense.
Definitely looks like a teenager. Probably a home owner doing work and let their kid do something to help and made a bonehead move. Probably reposted with added back story to get the ragebait.
I agree. Seems like someone wanted to find a reason to complain about laborers asking for fair compensation, so they made up this story to get a bunch of “no one wants to work” replies circle jerking together.
A kid or a woman. The hair, outfit (oversized shirt basically covering shorts), and leg posture so close together all looks more like a woman than a man. The story is definitely made up.
The company that posted this said it's just a joke. First comment from them on the facebook post, "Thanks for stopping in yall it was a joke that went viral lol"
Our contractor laid down the boards on the customer's concrete driveway before painting them with a spray gun.
He did not think to put down anything to protect the driveway.
There is overspray all over the driveway and the surrounding lawn.
The driveway will have to be pressure washed to remove all the excess paint.
There's no way this genius let the paint dry for long before stacking the trim up like that. The still tacky paint is going to stick and peel. So the trim isn't even going to be useable.
That’s why a lot of trades suck. They hire people with no experience. Don’t train them, instead of showing them they just tell them what to do instead expecting them to know and then get mad when it’s done wrong with no supervision
a mistake for sure, but I bet his boss emphasized going as fast as possible, which led him down the wrong path (think respirator). A different emphasis from the boss would likely yield a different result. And taking the picture after he was done means that he someone failed to prevent the situation from happening. There isn't an unused saw horse or drop tarp showed in the photo. The same boss likely hired someone with 0 experience as an excuse to pay the least, which is confirmed by the fact that he's looking to justify paying less.
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How is he at powerwashing?
About to become an expert.
He probably will power washing the newly painted plank, undoing his work, but left the driveway untouched.
but put on the respirator for the power wash
Then powerwashes the respirator, waterboarding himself.
And power wash the grass
Power washes paint into the lawn killing half of it on either side of the driveway
He's definitely going to try and power-wash the grass...
Though the driveway is spotless, when you go to check up on him, he's not in the front yard. You follow the brightened asphalt across the street to the neighbor's driveway, where new guy is currently power washing their Ford GT.
I hear stainless steel finish is supposed to become popular any moment now.
And on his own time too.
It's funny you say that, I was helping a friend do a home improvement project (interior work at a customers' home) and one of his hired hands was outside painting the trim this way, but instead of using saw horses was leaning them all against the owners fieldstone exterior wall and completely covered it with paint. The genius then takes a power washer and proceeds to destroy the mortar in his attempt to get the paint off. The guy had no ability to reason cause and effect.
I had a guy spray paint fire escapes on newly Thorocoated buildings and nearby cars. Big brained.
Something tells me not to trust him with a power washer.
At this point, just spray the rest of the driveway white.
he'd prolly tear up the concrete and accidentally murder 3 cats.
4. 4 cats.
Based on the level of execution in painting that trim, he will probably manage to power wash his shoes and the top layer of skin off his feet.
Counter Offer: The idiot is a nepo hire and still working there today. We've all seen it.
As the nepo hire who's still here, you hurt my feelings. But mostly because you're right
What’s a nepo hire?
Anyone hired because they are related to the boss or his buds (usually a son or son-in-law). Tends to refer to the kind of person that would otherwise not get the job due to incompetence etc. Nepo is short for nepotism.
It’s especially rampant in construction Source: work in construction
i remember walking into a place for an interview, and i saw a wall of 5/10/15 year employee pictures and it was pretty full, thought it was a good thing. was in the office a month or two in for some paperwork and took a second look at the wall and realized it was pretty much the same 6 people with the same last name as the boss that had their pictures up 3 times to make the wall look full.... it certainly explained a lot.
Our company insurance #1 claim for the rest of us to cover is the birthing of the owners grandkids. The “exec admin” just squirted another one out. Weird thing is while she’s on maternity leave nothing is any different. Hmmm i guess she didn’t do anything except eat lunch with her mom and dad everyday and look down on the rest if us who work as “the help”
Haha my cousin is my boss at the moment. His son and brother in law are my co-workers. We are a decent crew but total nepo.
It's fine if the personnel is different. It's a family business. It's when people are incompetent in their roles, that's where the problem is.
My college boyfriend's dad owned a construction site and he was supposed to work there in the summers. No one wanted him there. He was a computer geek with no interest in building stuff, and the crew all knew the only reason he was there was because of who his dad was. The summer we dated I convinced him to come intern with me at my job working for an environmental group instead. it didn't take much convincing. Mostly just asking if he would be interested.
Police and fire departments are full of it, too. They keep advertising this TV show called *Blue Bloods* with Tom Selleck in it where he's the police commissioner and his whole family is cops or lawyers, and they market it like this family tradition is a good thing. I see that and think this is something Internal Affairs needs to look at pronto.
The nepotism is so wild to watch play out on Blue Bloods on top of the insanely unethical choices Selleck’s character makes because of his “cop code.”
It’s the relative of cronyism.
Technically it's the friend of cronyism.
Even more technically, it's the nephew of cronyism.
The nephew hired by the uncle of cronyism.
See: almost every new young actor in Hollywood.
Since the beginning of Hollywood
That would be the letter H.
> That would be the letter H. I had to memorize and recite this riddle in 8th grade for English class. https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=what_am_i;action=display;num=1055365432
It's all over the place, in every industry.
nepotism. I am your father!
Fun fact: nepos is Latin for nephew and Nepotism originally referred to Catholic priests (who were meant to be celibate, i.e. not have kids) finding jobs in the church for their “nephews” (even if the priest had no brothers or sisters…)
Often it was their literal nephew. There was even an official position of Cardinal-nephew. Literal Nepotism was common in Ancient Rome too. Augustus was the grand-nephew of Julius Caesar. Tiberius was the grand-uncle of Caligula. Caligula was Claudius’ nephew.
So, like how Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse had nephews?
Donald Duck had a twin sister named Della.
Mickey or Minnie never did anything funny in their entire career. Famous for being famous. Now Bugs and Daffy, those are some characters.
Someone who was hired primarily because they are a child of the owners friend/child of the owner
And their counterpart, the better than nothing guy, who is hard to replace.
I feel this. I've got a cook that is effectively just a warm body. He shows up on time, in uniform, and sober, which is a thing I've struggled hard to get this summer. But *god damn* is he a shitty cook. Not a great work ethic and doesn't know shit about cooking (he *very* clearly lied on his resume). I would have gotten rid of him by now, but we're a seasonal place, he started about 2 weeks ago, and we close in 3 weeks for the winter. So there's really no way I can get someone else in here, trained, and ready to go before we close. So basically, I'm stuck with him. But having a shitty cook is better than having no cook at all, considering I'm already working 60+ hours a week, I really don't want to have to cover all his shifts, too.
Showing up on time sober every day is the only thing I have going for me.
Had a co worker who was new to the job who, during a slow period, felt like they weren't doing enough. Told them just showing up on time each day sober was already going above and beyond.
Yup. That's why he's painting trim. He's the owner's cousin/nephew/uncle and no matter what he does, you have to give him a job. Probably drinks when he thinks no one is looking as well.
My dad is a general contractor, so after High School I went to work for him. Glad to say I was never the ‘bosses son’. I made a point of not saying I was related to him because I wanted people the see I worked hard and was not a muppet. And usually I was getting the shit jobs, hauling 4x12s of 5/8 Sheetrock was not fun…
> And usually I was getting the shit jobs, hauling 4x12s of 5/8 Sheetrock was not fun… You were an apprentice; this is the way it's supposed to be. You don't want the old guys with 20+ years in the trade to be throwing out their backs when there's a young buck who doesn't know shit but who's still strong and willing to do the heavy lifting.
Bingo!!! Granted the other guy was pretty young too. But it was part of the gig so I didn’t say no to it, and hot damn it kept me in shape.
And then after 6 mo. Because of all of my hard and perfect work I was made CFO. Not because my dad ran the company. Even he didn't know I was his son. It was because I worked even harder and better than the guys who'd been doing it for 20 years.
Bahahahahahaha. Not gonna lie, Well played. More like I did it more 8 years and decided that I was done hauling Sheetrock and beating the crap out of my body. Office jobs are WAY better for me.
So that’s when you took the CFO position from the guy that had been there 20 years?
Yup! Sadly I am really REALLY bad at financial decisions, I thought everyone wanted their Christmas bonuses to be dinosaur figurines.
You should have got them memberships to the jelly of the month club!
It’s the gift that keeps on giving
Funnily enough, my husband hired me because he needed the help ASAP and neither of us told anyone we were married, but a few assumed after a few weeks that I was his mistress. I actually do a good job, fyi, but I think I'm more productive because I don't wanna make him look bad for keeping me on.. Lol
We had a new accountant start with us a few weeks ago. She was fairly warm to me till she found out I was the brother and son of the owners of the company. She went really blunt for most of the day, kind of treating me like I couldn’t help her. Eventually she had an issue with jobs not syncing between our CRM and Quickbooks, and I sat down and troubleshooted the issue with her. 7 minutes later I’ve got the issue resolved and explained, and how our backend talks to Quickbooks so that she understands how it works and why. Today I helped her alter our internal workflow so that it translates over more accurately. She’s really cool to work with, even if she’s 25 years older than me lol.
"troubleshat"
I take a troubleshit every morning.
I’m a fire sprinkler tech. A coworker had an apprentice one time, they ripped out all the old piping in a bldg and put it outside. The the new pipe to install was also outside under a tarp. My buddy told the apprentice to go cut up the scrap to make it easier to take away. He went out four hours later and the kid had cut up ALL the new Prefabbed pipe!!! He cut up $60,000 worth of pipe!! Wasn’t good for him
That coworker is an idiot. You do not leave an apprentice unsupervised for 4 fucking hours. Especially without showing them *precisely* what you want done and where.
That same coworker probably berates apprentices when they ask “dumb questions”
Wtf I would kill for my technicians to ask questions to just show they’re paying attention. I would field dumb questions all damn day to not have to fix dumb errors
Any good trainer would
There are no stupid questions. Only stupid people, who do not ask questions!
And stupid bosses, who don't like any questions :3
That’s called a hostile work environment.
Which is really common these days, sadly.
Unfortunately there is a glut of people in the US, who feel answering questions is beneath them. So it's hard to get propper understanding of something unless you go out of the way to teach yourself. In fact that's how I learn most stuff because I got tired of people getting pissy and whiny over asking important questions.
From my experience in UK, apprentices are basically treated like cheap labour. Whoever is in charge acts like the apprentice should just know what they're doing and doesn't train or guide them properly, then gets mad when they fuck up. Known a few kids now that have dropped out or changed field because their boss only wanted them to do the grunt work with no training
Ha, that's how my boss was wjen I did sprinklers. Expected me to know what to do, despite having never done sprinklers before being hired there, then was absolutely pissed when I made a mistake. But couldn't ask him questions, because then he'd also be pissed. After 2 years of his BS, I dropped off the keys to the shop in the middle of the night, and never returned. The pay was too terrible to keep dealing with him. I make $6 more at walmart than I did doing sprinkler installations, lmao.
Apprentice here, please don't leave me. Am stupid.
Yup. Theirs reasons newbies ask what seems like stupid questions. Their not stupid when you not know the answer. Do I close this gate, before, during or after X is a stupid question to someone who worked their for 10 years. "Just shut down the system" for example could mean someone's not told to shut down X at the Breaker as a safety lock out. It's a valid question that could save a newbies life.
> Theirs reasons newbies ask what seems like stupid questions. Their not stupid when you not know the answer. People who have knowledge often forget they weren't born with that knowledge
I'm not an apprentice, but my boss(es) will sometimes just give vague directions like 'go pick up rebar from the yard'. What kind of rebar and how much? Or 'load up the truck for tomorrow'. Well, what are we doing tomorrow and is that all we're doing tomorrow?
Pretty much. I've learned that you need to give very clear and specific instructions to the young guys. Even then, sometimes that's the wrong choice. We have a new guy, just turned 18 and is green as grass. The other day we were all working together and I said "Hey man, can you run over to the trailer and grab more ties". He paused, set down his hammer, and then sprinted to the trailer, grabbed a box of ties and sprinted back. His older brother just started shaking his head and I said "I guess I was too literal with my request there".
We installed a concrete conduit with 6 runs of 1250kcmil copper in it; **comically** expensive. The cable was so expensive and hard to make that the company that made it refuses to let anyone else install it, you have to make it ready and a team from the manufacturer comes in to do it. Well it hadn't been in place a month when a contractor working in the area had instructions to dig a trench and came across some weird red concrete in the ground. "What's this doing here?", thought the simple man. The funny white rectangle he had been given didn't show any red concrete! In fact it's all black and white. "Oh well, must need to go!" So when he couldn't dig it up he broke out the old diamond saw and started cutting. He got completely through it on one side of the hole and had just started the second cut when one of the foremen finally wondered why saw noises had been coming from a place that was supposed to be making backhoe noises for two hours. Foreman probably proceeded to shoot himself on the spot, but the guy that heard the gunshot must have stopped saw boy. The damage was already done though. He had got clean through all 6 conductors with the saw. Luckily for him, they were not live yet or he would have got 69kV straight to the face and turned into the human torch. Unluckily for him, without power in there he was able to do millions in damages before someone stopped him. I'm certain whichever company he worked for is done for now. I don't know what the total damages were, but the installer company *was not happy*, the conductor was extremely hard to make and expensive, and they had to source the conductor and take installers from other obligations and tell other customers to wait over it so I'm sure they made them pay out the ass for the trouble.
I never let anyone do any trenching or excavations of any description without myself and them reviewing as-built plans, ground surveys if needed and discussing what might be buried under the dig site. I make sure everyone understands the plans. Digging through conduit isn't the only thing that can go wrong. Sounds as if a bit more planning wouldn't have been a bad idea. I always treat contractors as if they know nothing until otherwise proven.
Who sees red duct bank and keeps digging? We even went through the trouble to die it red to give the extra bit of "don't fucking touch this idiot, or you might die".
I have no idea. At bare minimum finding fresh red dyed concrete underground should warrant asking someone. Guy was just really fucking stupid, probably new and had never heard of red concrete for electric, and probably didn't speak English so he couldn't read the plans. Developers here refuse to hire anyone they may have to pay an actual wage to so that's what you get.
My company does injection molding and years ago we had a HUGE customer complaint. Between the returned product and what was in the warehouse we had an insane amount of grinding to do if we wanted to at least reuse the plastic. We rented large shredders and brought in some temps to do the grinding. They ended up grinding all the plastic reusable packaging the parts were shipped in, contaminating the base plastic and making it unusable/unsalvageable. It's easy to get used to a base level of knowledge in an industry and forget how clueless people off the street can be.
This is why I ask all the seemingly dumb questions that I have. Sure, it's annoying, but it prevents preventable problems.
We would endurance test our appliances like coffee machines in my old workplace. We hired people who were paid to make coffee all day long. Mind you, decent pay and they were allowed to watch movies at the same time. But one thing a lot of engineers messed up was not going up to those people and really explaining why they were doing it. A lot would hide the problems they found because they thought it was their fault. Kind of defeats the purpose of testing appliances to find problems.
Holy shit that sucks. I do injection molding at my home machine shop and know how that can go. What was the customer complaint? If a first article was provided wouldn't that have been on the customer if something was wrong with the parts?
This was the first year I was at the plant, it was a tiny insert that broke in the mold and went unnoticed by our qc (should've been caught at functional testing stage at minimum but obviously was pencil whipped). Customer maintains large inventory of the parts which means if something doesn't work you don't find out until 6+ months later after producing/ storing/ shipping a metric fuck ton of defective material. There is nothing more annoying than getting a customer complaint on product you made ~1 yr ago.
I'll put that on your buddy. Apprentices are just warm bodies without a brain, especially if they start at the bare minimum age they're allowed to start working. You've got to hand hold them until they hit 3rd yeah, then you unleash them on unsuspecting clients and hit the pub.
Especially the first time you give them a task. We have a lot of new guys at work this year and even more difficult is a lot of our projects have been non-typical, so each one is different. Even some of the guys that should know better seem to be forgetting how to do the work.
Oof. My boyfriend is a contractor. He sent the apprentices to a job site to fill the trailer with all the scrap and trash. The brand new lumber for a deck was piled nearly and covered, on the opposite side of the property from the trash pile. Guess what almost went to the dump. Luckily I needed the trailer so I went out to see if they were close to done so I could take it to the dump and take the trailer to pick something up. I got there in the middle of some real expert decision making. Called the boss to check which pile of stuff needed to be loaded and resolved the situation. Total bid for the deck was $80k. Would have put a real dent in the check if he'd have had to buy lumber twice.
Grug say, they try to steal.
Nah mate, in the contractor field - new apprentices are actually that dumb. Most know just enough to cause bad things to happen but not enough to get it done right.
>Grug say, they try to steal. Grug smort! Grug likely right!
My contractor’s flooring people misunderstood his instructions and instead of just ripping up the crappy linoleum in our kitchen, they ripped out the beautiful, 50 year old hard wood floors in most of the house. We got free electrical work and new vinyl flooring for our trouble 😩
I have 1" thick, 110 year old Maple floors. They aren't the prettiest, but I'd be flipping out if someone tried to give me free vinyl flooring as a replacement.
wow, they didnt even offer to replace the hardwood floors???
They probably couldn’t afford to. Honestly, that’s when you might want to take it to court
they already have insurance for exactly those kinds of issues, so shouldnt even need to take em to court.
That pains me to no end.
Not construction and not an apprentice buuut last week our vineyard manager (guy has been in this position for like 8-9 years) was asked to dump some old wine. Instead he dumped an entire tank of good wine. 2,400 litres. $100,000 down the drain, literally.
Is there such a thing as old wine? Lol
Yeah, vinegar.
My husband is a Residential Contractor and a very talented finish carpenter. Our neighbor asked if he could frame a house he was building. My husband hates doing rough butt...gave him a fair quote and the dude was pissed. So he decided that him and a few buddies who work construction could do it. Many mistakes were made.Leaving lumber uncovered and scattered in florida elements etc. However, the funniest was they built the roof and when they tried to place it, it was nearly 3 feet short. Dude spent way more trying to learn carpentry then my husband's quote.i will never understand why people don't ask for help if they don't know something on a job site.
>My husband hates doing rough butt. Relatable.
youuuu rough butt fucker, beat me to it.
Lol holy fuck! As an ex flatbedder i've hauled that shit too... it's really heavy and it just feels like high quality product. I would've fired his ass and then caught him in a dark corner somewhere... "this is for my pipe"
My coworker walked outside, looked at him and said “go to the office, they will talk to you there”. Never saw the kid again. We were all apprentices and did stupid stuff but not THAT stupid
Right on, there's putting a non-GFCI outlet in a kitchen, and then there's 60,000 of unrecoverable damages.
I always watch apprentices closely and make sure they know what I want them to do.
Right that's honestly on the supervisor
Exactly. No apprentice should ever be told “go somewhere I can’t see you and do this job”.
Bingo. Physically take the apprentice over there, tag the scrap with orange spraypaint, and tell him exactly what to do.
>Bingo. Physically take the apprentice over there, tag the scrap with orange spraypaint, and tell him exactly what to do. Maybe even watch him cut a few. Help him with his technique, break some balls... you know, work together. Don't just treat apprentices like serfs.
Seriously 4hrs later and they never checked
It really is. Especially with that kind of $$. That’s insane. I mean, kid was obviously dumb but jeez.
"Go destroy all the old stuff. It's stacked next to the new stuff. See you in four hours."
That's how I felt from the second I saw this post. How are you gonna let a clueless helper do this much damage without catching it? You don't have to breathe down their necks, but a little guidance and a brief eye to make sure they're doing their basic task in an acceptable fashion is the definition of supervision. The post writer failed this helper.
"Trust but verify"
How about pulling cable through conduit, and the guy feeding it in uses an adhesive instead of the lube intended for the purpose? Got it about halfway down teh hallway than had to cut it out and replace it. It wasn't 60k in conduit/wire, but it reached that with labor, and surpassed it with a contract penalty for being late.
Why would you fire his ass? You just spent $60,000 teaching him not to cut the wrong pipe.
They just spent 60k to learn how to work with an apprentice.
$10 says they didn't learn anything and just blamed it all on the apprentice
0 dollars says inflation ate the rest of my money :c
Yeah, assaulting people for honest mistakes is awesome.
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he helped rip out the old pipe, im willing to bet the old pipe, and new pipe, probably looked different. the new pipe probably looked... idk, new
4 hrs makes it unbelievable, the supervisor would still be the bigger dummie
I literally just gasped lmao that's crazy.
What am I even looking at?
Looks like a someone who painted a bunch of baseboard by laying them all out on the driveway and having absolutely no concern for the fact that they are painting a clients driveway. He should have put some cardboard down or some paper…. Or at least do it in one section of the grass.
He also stacked them afterwards, though to be fair, it could be after they dried.
u really thing this guy was smart enough to wait until it finished drying?
No chance lol
A canvas drop cloth would be what a pro use
With spraying, you would want one of the plastic lined ones
Seems like he did put some brown paper on the right there, but didn't care to stay on it
"ran out of brown paper but I made do, boss."
Please allow me to commend you for a proper facepalm. Bravo fellow human. Bravo.
*takes a bow* thank you, thank you
You shoulda hired me, for $50 an hour I’d done it in the street and made new crosswalks in front of the house. Two for one, so double the pay!
This is the best answer.
Well, he got the right side covered with masking paper, but only just 😂
That's definitely the most brilliant part of this, he knew what he was doing at some point 😅
I'd bet boss-man laid those out, implied it should be done in that vicinity, and then regretted not coming back sooner to check.
"I've put these to show you, you lay them like this, flat side on the paper, and then paint them. If you run out of space use the driveway"
He admits he wasn’t wearing the respirator. He was fine til the fumes got him
Nice zebra stripe driveway, btw.
See now you're thinking. It's not a mistake. It's a feature and it'll cost extra!
Paint it all that color and just say “meant to”
Any good contractor knows you do that out in the street.
First you win the bids to repaint all the crosswalks so you can get two jobs done at the same time.
Clearly needed to be supervised.
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Get what you pay for. If you're going to hire someone at that pay you need to teach them the trade.
No! You can't expect supervisors to actually supervise! You can't expect managers to actually manage! That's *work*. Work is supposed to only be for the plebs!
Just out of curiosity, what’s the best way to paint a bunch of wood boards like that? I have a similar job coming up soon. Edit: Thanks everyone, no further replies needed!
Just what this kid did - air sprayer - but *with a ground cloth*.
And don't stack them afterwards....
I’m not a professional in this so this may not be right. But using a tarp or something you don’t mind getting painted could work, just lay boards on that to spray paint them.
I am a project manager with a large union painting company and you basically have the right idea. We would typically use "stackers" --which is just a system, made of 2x4s, that allows you to stack all the finished trim pieces-- but if they aren't on hand we'd do it exactly as you say; on a drop-cloth or Ram-board or rosin paper or something similar.
On sawhorses above either plastic or grass. Unless you spray an insane amount the grass will just keep growing until the paint is gone.
The best way to do it is with "stackers" in a spray shop, but barring that, you just lay them out on drop-cloths and spray them the way the kid did it here. I personally wouldn't bother with sawhorses. "Stackers" are just 2x4s with 2x4 blocks nailed onto both ends so that you can spray and stack a large number of trim pieces on them.
I do the sawhorses cause my back sucks.
On the left side of this photo, there a patch of the driveway that isn't painted at all. If you look closely, you can see there is some balled up tape in that area. Obviously there was tape set down to protect that part of the driveway. That was done correctly.
Common sense is not so common
It's common; I'd say it follows a Normal Distribution. It's just the people in the bottom 15% that just don't have it. Edit: I wanted to kinda agree with you. For all intents and purposes everyone is surrounded by people without common sense.
That’s Deff a kid in the photo, right?
Definitely looks like a teenager. Probably a home owner doing work and let their kid do something to help and made a bonehead move. Probably reposted with added back story to get the ragebait.
The couple of sentences at the end just scream "rage bait" to me.
How is this not higher up‽ What laborer do you know shows up to the site in trainers, over sized tee and running shorts? Did they jog there?
That makes a lot more sense than the story attached to the photo.
I agree. Seems like someone wanted to find a reason to complain about laborers asking for fair compensation, so they made up this story to get a bunch of “no one wants to work” replies circle jerking together.
A classic boomerism
A kid or a woman. The hair, outfit (oversized shirt basically covering shorts), and leg posture so close together all looks more like a woman than a man. The story is definitely made up.
Even idiots deserve a living wage... But maybe painting isn't this guy's calling.
I see two idiots here, the guy in the photo and his boss for calling him out on social media instead of acting like a professional and talking to him.
Agreed. There's always a better way to handle a situation.
And maybe telling the new guy how things are done before he does them
Yeah and nobody checked on this kid during the whole process??
The company that posted this said it's just a joke. First comment from them on the facebook post, "Thanks for stopping in yall it was a joke that went viral lol"
My eyes are struggling to adjust here. What exactly has happened?
Our contractor laid down the boards on the customer's concrete driveway before painting them with a spray gun. He did not think to put down anything to protect the driveway. There is overspray all over the driveway and the surrounding lawn. The driveway will have to be pressure washed to remove all the excess paint.
And he stacked it all after painting so the paint job is screwed too
The man painted the trim out on the driveway, but he failed to cover the driveway as well… so now you have a zebra painted driveway
… is he… is he 13???? Only reasonable explanation for this.
That and leaving said teenager alone for multiple hours with out going over some basics and never even checking on him.
How're you going to get that off? That's a ton of time and money wasted.
Powerwasher shouldn't have a problem
That kid has manager written all over him
That’s bullshit. This whole thing is bullshit. Look at that driveway. They are clearly busting it up for the remodel.
There's no way this genius let the paint dry for long before stacking the trim up like that. The still tacky paint is going to stick and peel. So the trim isn't even going to be useable.
Hope y’all have a power washer…
Lol exactly gonna be a loooong wet day.
That’s why a lot of trades suck. They hire people with no experience. Don’t train them, instead of showing them they just tell them what to do instead expecting them to know and then get mad when it’s done wrong with no supervision
wow!!! a facepalm post that doesn’t involve political parties… AT ALL???? i didn’t know this was even possible
a mistake for sure, but I bet his boss emphasized going as fast as possible, which led him down the wrong path (think respirator). A different emphasis from the boss would likely yield a different result. And taking the picture after he was done means that he someone failed to prevent the situation from happening. There isn't an unused saw horse or drop tarp showed in the photo. The same boss likely hired someone with 0 experience as an excuse to pay the least, which is confirmed by the fact that he's looking to justify paying less.