Measuring a flag pole? They should have called an estimator.

Boy Scouts used to be taught to measure the height of a tree by holding up a
stick with your thumb on the bottom and transposing the length to a nearby
area where you could pace out the distance. It should not take more than 5
minutes to measure a flag pole and at the same time do no harm. Possibly this
is no longer included in the manual, along with occasional threats to
eliminate all trade related merit badges.

A while back I showed the trick to a young engineering student and he thought
I was a genius. I think he was of the impression I had invented the method.
Probably invented by the Sumerians and their extraterrestrial ancestors used
it before them for planet hopping. On my part I attribute the knowledge to
compulsive learning disorder.

Not to put my manhood too much on the line, but my measuring pace is 2.6
lineal feet, .4 short of the nominal 3 lineal foot of myth. This has been
proven out for me many times. About once every three months I recalibrate. I
find that my "state of mind" affects my pace and when pacing out a distance,
say for a roof or a sidewalk bridge, I have to put my mental state in the pace
mode. You can have other states of mind that tend to mess up the measure.
Skipping messes thinkgs up, pacing while inebriated is a waste of effort, and
don't pace with a thorn in your sole. I think you have to feel content and
slightly empty headed to pace consistently.

Many years ago it was suggested to me to learn to walk into a space and
visually quantify the surroundings. One wall in my office space is 100 square
feet, and for the curious who stumble into my den of chaos, is near a center
point labeled accordingly. Over the years I've grown accustomed to visually
take-off dimensions, and though I carry a few measuring tapes, rarely if ever
do I use them. I find the most important element in an estimate is labor and
that an accurate measure of space is less important for estimating purposes
than figuring out what mechanics will do when faced with a situation. Often
the physical reality is less important in cost consideration than the
political. The wall in my office I also use to recalibrate, just as with the
pacing.

When going through a set of drawings and trying to match a work process to a
quantity of space I will often look at the 100 SF wall, shut my eyes, and
slowly work through assigning time increments to tasks for the area of the
wall. I have to think in terms of physical motion of human bodies working
through a process. I can be sitting in my office and visualizing the hanging
off the side of the General Motors Building, 700' feet up, on a sunny day with
scattered cloud cover, slight breeze. -- how long does it take to caulk 20 LF
of expansion joint? How long does it take the workers to get there? How long
does it take to go up in the elevator as opposed to down on the scaffold? I
suppose a certain element of self-identification comes into play to make it
that as an estimator grows old and feeble they might imagine it takes longer
to perform a task (I'll leave off there. Forget the viagra jokes!). Once the
imagining part of my wall work is done I then can fairly easily break this
down into unit prices and extrapolate to a full project scope. The effort of
visualization I find accurate, though exhausting, particularly if the flow is
broken by a constant stream of interruptions.

Visualization is, for me, a prerequisite of accurate estimating. You have to
be able to visualize in terms of spatial, color, biophysical and time. I've
spent a lot of time looking at the world with a consciousness of time-motion
studies. My early working experience of economizing my physical energy
expended in shoveling bull manure into a pick-up truck pays off now in my
estimating.

Breaking to write e-mail, a diversion, helps to keep my head straight. The
more distorted episodes of Gab & Eti occur usually when I stress myself out
with a large estimate such that all input gets spit back out as nearly
gibberish. Getting rid of the background noise aids me in keeping focus where
needed.

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