Can we talk about the old guy at the print shop who saved my first set of plans?

I was fresh out of school, printing my first real set of architectural drawings at a local shop in Tacoma. The owner, a man named Frank, looked them over and pointed right at a detail callout. He said, 'Kid, your scale is off by a factor of ten here. The client's builder will order the wrong steel.' He grabbed a red pen and showed me how to fix it in about two minutes. That one check saved me from a huge mistake. Has anyone else had a simple piece of advice from an old hand save their skin?

3 comments

3 Comments

emerydixon2mo ago

Wait, the scale was off by a factor of ten? That's not a small mistake. That's the kind of thing that gets a building condemned. Frank basically saved your whole career in two minutes with a red pen.

the_river2mo ago

My old boss caught a decimal error that saved a whole project.

cameron76325d agoMost Upvoted

Ha, no kidding. I had a buddy who worked in construction management. He told me about a time they were pouring concrete for a parking garage and his foreman noticed the rebar spacing was off by just half an inch. That little mistake would have turned the whole second story into a deck of cards. Frank really did save the day on that one, @emerydixon. Funny how a tiny set of eyes can catch something that a whole crew of people just walked past.