Confusion on the Job

Howdy, Everybody;

It was supposed to be a three-day weekend (Labor Day), but one of our major customers wanted to do a start-up on a pump system located a couple hundred miles from here, on Saturday. It worked out that I needed to take my Jeep, so I got up at 5 AM, left as soon as I could get ready, taking my one cup of coffee with me.

Let me tell you about coffee - if I don't get that first cup of coffee, it is not safe for me to be on the road. Besides that, I get the standard caffeine headache if I don't get enough in the mornings. Usually I drink 3-4 cups, but on this day I only got one. Amazingly enough, I didn't get a headache that day.

In any case, my GPS took me directly to the job site about three hours later, arriving around 8:30 AM. My boss, G, was there about an hour ahead of me. He's way more energetic than I am. Also younger. When I caught up with him, he told me they weren't ready for us, by a long shot. See, to dial in the controls on these pumps, certain things have to be done. There was steady work being done by a herd of electricians, but they were still wiring in the controls, and the two 600 HP motors. The flow meters and level detectors weren't wired up. For that matter, the level detectors hadn't even been installed. And finally, the tanks need to have a lot of water in them so we'd have something to pump. There was maybe 2 - 3 feet of water in the tanks - nowhere near enough. At least a couple of days worth of work.

We had a controls programming guy flying in from somewhere - he was at the local airport. We also had two people there from the pump manufacturer, who drove about 500 miles to get there. There was me and G who each drove 200 miles one way to get there. And there was a level detector rep also supposed to be on his way, also from our area.

So, we all sat around for a couple of hours waiting for the customer's manager to show up. I took a whole lot of digital pictures, as we find them immensely useful at times, and then cooled my heels waiting. Had to move down the concrete curb we were sitting on every so often as the shadows moved. Watched this ant crawl around wondering how the heck he wound up in this rocky desert (they spread crushed rock all over the job site for a driving surface).

Eventually, the manager (J) showed up. I understand he's over several sites like this in the area. Anyhow, he and G walked around looking at stuff and in a few minutes he had agreed we weren't doing anything useful by being there today, and it would probably be Tuesday at the soonest and maybe later. So we were dismissed.

So we scattered, all going our separate directions. G went to meet his family in the Houston area for the holiday - I went back home, arriving around 3 PM. Had to stop and walk around several times on the way back when I was trying to nod off. Driving always puts me to sleep, especially in the afternoons and evenings.

All of this business is, of course, finance driven. Ultimately the customer knows that every day he is not pumping, he's losing money. So that justifies it, in their minds. And from my company's standpoint, willingness to jump when the customer says frog is part of our customer service. We get business that others don't get, because of it. Again, finance driven.

I don't mind doing what I need to do - as long as the effort isn't wasted. I am more than a little perturbed because our customer apparently thinks so little of our efforts that they don't care if they waste them.
Why did this false alarm happen? It is simply not possible that the people on site didn't realize they weren't ready. I'm not going to speculate on the actual reasons, but it surely demonstrates two things - amazing lack of coordination on our customer's part; and a likewise amazing indifference to the disruption of personal plans of the several people (and their families!) who's time was wasted and who's holiday weekends were wrecked, completely without reason.

As for me personally, I'm not really mad about it in this case. As it happened, the only plans of mine that were disrupted (this time) was a work day around the house. I'm certain that no malice was involved, and G was operating on the information given to him. It just frustrates me how wasteful the whole thing was. I place high value on my time off work - I work to live, I don't live to work. But if G requires me to be somewhere on a Saturday, that's where I'll be if I can. Besides being my boss, he is my friend - a unique relationship, in my experience.

But the next time this customer shouts 'frog', I may not be quite so quick to jump. What goes around comes around.

-Pop