7. Socks and concrete

Previous - The East Bay

Icebreaker

I started buying my work socks at the local Icebreaker store, not because I needed high-end wool socks, but because they carried socks in my size that happened to be perfect for work. The thing about their little, thin socks that I wear under my heavy hiking socks, is that they are marked for Right and Left. At some point I'll probably get interested enough to reverse them to see if that makes any difference, but for now I've discovered another oddity that I'm confident would drive them nuts. (By the way, they claim they will replace your socks when they wear out. Haven't gotten a chance to test this yet.) 

The past two events I've had a problem with just my right thin sock sliding down past my heel. The rest of the sock stays in position, I just don't have coverage of the heel. The second or third time this happened I determined that the cause was a shoe insert I only use in the right shoe (for reasons). On a whim, the next time the sock slid down I took it off and put it back on inside out. It stayed up! Problem solved.

Contractors

When we hire people to perform work -- painting, plumbing, construction -- I try to stay out of their way and let them do their job. But often (too often) they don't seem up to doing their job and I have to intervene. This is tricky. Strangely, this has happened the most with plumbers -- it's strange because plumbing is the one thing I wont touch and yet I find myself problem solving or replacing one plumber with another because I can see that they don't know what they're doing.

The seismic contractors who have been working on our building for the past month and more (they wrapped Phase 1 today) really seem to know their seismic work -- and all that work is inspected. But as a consequence of this work, they also had to replace maybe 70% of the concrete floor in our laundry room. I didn't pay much attention (though I love working with concrete and was dying to jump in there) because that floor had not been good to start with -- for example the drain was at one of the higher points of the floor -- and I figured that they knew more about it than I did and it was bound to be better than before. Not necessarily.

They actually wrapped up last Friday, but after they left I poked around and discovered some problems, besides the washer drain problem they knew about. The new floor drain -- the actual drain pipe that leads eventually to the sewer -- was placed so that water on the floor could never reach it. I took a picture, sent it in an email to the manager, and waited for it to get fixed on Monday. 

It took me some time to make the guys -- two of the regular guys who've been on the job all along and a plumber -- understand what my problem was. I knew the plumber had finally got it when he started cursing -- this seems to be the way good plumbers react to other people screwing up a job. 

Then we hosed a bunch of water onto the floor and discovered that it was much worse than I had realized -- once again the drain was at a high area only now the path water used to take to run out under the side door and under the building was blocked by a concrete curb. They had to cut a notch in the pavement to drain that corner. And instead of a single, square drain in the center of the room, they cut a trench in the new concrete and put in a linear drain that stretched from that point to near the wall behind the washer. Today they poured concrete around the new linear drain. 

It's better. But there are still two places (one behind the washer and one behind a rise where the new concrete starts in the middle of the floor) where water still pools and can't get to the four or five foot long drain. 

If they had asked me, I would have told them we didn't care where the drain was as long as it was at the low point. But they never asked. 

Next - 8. I've got nothing