Brian,

Incredible dimensional stories from you and Cuyler.

As to solving the problem with the floor I turned a few stones 90 
degrees and with the modest quantity of stone recovered from revised 
wall configurations it looks like we are going to make it all fit 
relatively perfect. It will look like somebody meant it to be that way. 
The floor has a 5" wide band on the perimeter of a mottled gray-white 
marble with a field of 2 tones of white. Keep in mind that it was 
salvaged 20 some years ago before it went into the first bathroom... and 
the guys who made the first bathroom cut the stone to fit what they 
found. I am always amazed when suddenly we have no confidence in 
anything that we believe that we know. I am beginning to look at it as 
similar to all the times my heart monitor flat lined.

Not exactly relevant but as I remarked to a young bricky recently I 
never made it past lunch on a brick line.

My very first experience working with stone slabs I was hired by a 
Portuguese mason in DC. I was to install a Canadian black stone in a 
small bank lobby. Though I had years of dry stone, split cobble walls, 
retaining walls, patios and fireplaces behind me I had never played with 
stone veneer slabs. The first day went sorta OK but the mason was pissed 
at how little we got done. The second day we had to cut an opening for 
an electrical box and I asked the guy that was helping me how to do it. 
As I remember he said to drill through from behind... cut partway 
through possibly would have worked, drilling blew out the face of the 
stone. The mason came back and he saw the $1,500 stone with a hole in 
it, went ballistic... busted it up with a sledge. Threw it in his truck 
then drove off to dump it into the Potomac. Told us to say that we had 
never seen it. That it had never been delivered. The third day I was put 
on the C&O Canal and told that the owner's brother who was running the 
job was a moron and that I was to take over running the job. For some 
reason nobody wanted to tell the brother that he was a moron. I quit the 
fourth day.

The way I had met the Portuguese mason is that I was working for a stone 
company that was building an ice skating rink on Pennsylvania Ave. not 
far from the White House. He was the sub. There were a whole lot of 
steps and a whole lot of pieces of pink granite to be set. The stone had 
been delivered to the site and stored unprotected and while site work 
went on (I remember distinctly the situation of concrete poured-in-place 
planter boxes being set in the wrong place and their having to bring in 
a crane to move them) the labels washed off all of the stones. I was 
assigned to go measure the stones and tell the mason which ones to put 
where. First off I had a bad set of drawings, so I stole the field 
engineer's copy... second off the mason would run over with his rule, 
grumble and curse at the stone and at me, grab whatever he could get his 
hands on then run off with it to set. There was a particular kind of 
madness going on... and there was another boss's son on site who was a 
moron... he had a degree in sociology and his wife worked at the 
Smithsonian. I will never forget the day he ran across the jobsite 
whooping like an Indian while waving a hatchet above his head, jumping 
over all the crap that can litter the most disorganized environment one 
can imagine. And as they had no idea what use to put him to he was the 
official safety man on the site. Regardless, the measure and run 
scenario drove me to drink and I was still under the influence the next 
day when I quit, to be hired immediately by the Portuguese mason.

After the Portuguese mason debacle I went and worked for an exterior 
panel systems company where eventually I got to be the guy that drove 
around fixing all the screw ups. I was pretty busy at that. One task was 
a project where one batch of the panels had too many pebbles on their 
face. I spent several days on a lift with a garden rake banging pebbles 
off of the panels in order to even out the pebble count, to adjust the 
pebble:field ratio. Everyone, and I mean everyone, in the company was 
either stoned or drunk, and that included the owners and management. I 
was also assigned there to work on crews under various foreman that I 
was instructed on the sly to take over their jobs because they were morons.

Interestingly I have found that to contract a $6 M project that once you 
get past the initial sick in the pit of the stomach feeling that 
possibly it should have been $7 M that there is a much greater chance on 
average of sleeping well at night than say doing a $20,000 project 
making mahogany lead coated copper lined box gutters then finding out 
when you go to install them that the front of the building you are 
installing them on is bowed 2". The other really bad feeling comes when 
you realize you signed something that you should not ever have signed.

Too many years back a roofer that we used for slate left his guys on a 
project in Manhattan -- not ours -- where they were torching down a 
small area of flat roof with a  modified bitumen. Our friend was off 
getting himself serviced at the time. Regardless, it was a wooden church 
and his guys burnt it pretty good. It caused a lot of problems for 
himself and others.

][<

 Robinson (eLearning) wrote:
> Ken, 
>
> Your story brought back memories of that sick in the pit of my stomach-cold sweat feeling

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