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My old boss laughed at me for scribbling on the back of my tape measure, now it is the first thing I teach new guys
Back in 2004 I was framing houses in Fresno and I kept making the same dumb mistake, cutting studs 1/4 inch short because I was reading the tape from the wrong side of the hook. My boss Ray watched me trash about 8 boards in one morning and finally grabbed my tape, flipped it over, and wrote "ADD 3" on the back with a sharpie. I thought he was messing with me. Turns out he meant add 3 inches to every measurement when I was working solo against a wall, because the hook grabs on the inside corner and I kept forgetting which way I was pulling. I started writing my own cut lists right on the back of the tape with a pencil, like "14 5/8 x6" and it saved me walking back to the truck for a notepad ten times a day. Now tapes come with a little white pad on the side for exactly this, and honestly I miss when you had to make your own. Any of you old guys still write on your tape, or did everyone switch to phone notes by now?
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matthew_wilson4615d ago
Man, hold on. Your boss wrote ADD 3 on the back? That would've wrecked me completely. I'd have been adding 3 inches to every single cut all day, wondering why nothing fit, and Ray would've been standing there watching me build a house out of spaghetti. Did he mean only when you're pulling against a wall? Because 3 inches is such a weird number too, not 2 or 4. I keep a pencil in my pouch and still scribble cut lists on whatever's handy but I never thought to use the tape itself.
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