Yesterday, I helped a couple of guys carry a large cabinet up some stairs. As we got to the top, the side of the cabinet hit a light stand and knocked it over. Being high quality junk, the head broke off the stand. Although the stand was made of steel tubing, the connections were all plastic. Anyway, the light bulb didn’t break.

One of the guys said, “Was that already broken?”

“Yeah,” I said. “You know, it was like that when we got here.”

They laughed. They laughed because there is a universal but normally unspoken rule on construction sites that any damage you do was already done when you got there. For example, if you are carrying a twenty foot cast iron pipe down the hall and make a turn but accidentally put the pipe through the glass in some door, you carefully back up and find some other way to get where you’re going, until you are enough distance away to be able to say, “Nah, that was already broken.”

But when I say this is universal, I mean it’s completely universal. The guy sweeping the floor will tell you he never made a mess. The guy smashing a hole through the wall to run a 16 by 12 duct will tell you the guys who built the wall forgot to leave that opening. The guy who built the wall will tell you the door frames were that crooked and pinched when he got them. And it works better when you talk to the people who are supposed to be running the job.

The site superintendant, who is responsible for a number of things, will quickly tell you the names and races of everyone who messed all those things up. The floor, for instance, which he is actually responsible for getting done, he will say was poured crooked by the concrete guys. Maybe so, but those guys would probably say the laser level was not set up properly.

A note about pouring concrete floors in large buildings. Used to be, the guys pouring the concrete would find the elevations along walls and use long screeds to get the elevation right in between. And the goal would be to get it flat. If the floor was not level, that was because the elevations they were going by were off. Anyway, no need for any of that anymore, because they go by the laser level.

The laser level is set up at one end of the building, and the receiver is carried around on a stick by one of these guys. The stick is placed on top of the poured concrete, and the receiver indicates whether or not that elevation is correct. So, they tend to pour and float it off without too much screeding. Good idea, because the laser level is perfectly accurate.

The stick, however, can conveniently be held perfectly plumb or slightly askew or even a lot askew to get the proper amount of beeping to say the floor is at the right elevation. So, up and down the floor rolls.

Then, when the pour gets to a doorway and they find the elevation is now an inch above the bottom of the door frame, because this end of the hallway is in fact an inch lower than the end where they started, they drop the concrete through the doorway and pick it back up again at the other side. So, you feel like you’re stepping in a hole when you walk through the door.

Let’s establish blame. The flooring guys will blame the concrete guys if the floor is rolling like the surface of the ocean. The concrete guys are only on the job for a day, they don’t care about anything. The site superintendant will blame the flooring guys if the floor looks like a roller coaster. He’ll blame the bricklayer if the door frames are sunk in the concrete. He may blame the guys who did the foundation for the same thing. He will likely blame the labourers if the floor is humped in the middle, because they must have put too much gravel there.

A superintendant once said, because the concrete foundation of the building was crooked, that the wind was blowing the string line while the forms were being set. He was the only guy on site at the time.

Him and the wind. He actually blamed the wind.