Back in the 1970’s and 80’s construction had a wry sense of humour. Photocopied jokes and notes were handed around.
Here are a couple that I’ve kept.
CONSTRUCTION DEFINITIONS
CONTRACTOR A gambler who never gets to shuffle, cut or deal.
BID A wild guess carried out to two decimal places.
SUCCESSFUL LOW BIDDER A contractor who is wondering what he left out.
HOME OFFICE ESTIMATE The cost of construction in heaven.
PROJECT MANAGER The conductor of an orchestra In which every musician is playing a different tune.
CONSTRUCTION CLAIM The contractor’s guess at the amount of money needed to transform a net loss into a gross profit.
CRITICAL PATH METHOD A management technique for losing your shirt under perfect control.
DELAYED PAYMENT A tourniquet applied at the pockets.
COMPLETION DATE A point at which liquidated damages begin.
LIQUIDATED DAMAGES A penalty for failing to achieve the impossible.
AUDITORS People who go in after the battle is lost and bayonet the wounded.
LAWYERS People who go in after the auditors and strip the-bodies.
Extra Notice To Contractors
1) The work we want done is clearly shown on the attached plans and specifications. Our engineer who has had plenty of college education spent one hell of a lot of time when he drew up these plans and specifications. But nobody can think of everything. Once your bid is in, that’s it brother. From then on anything wanted by our engineer or any of his friends or anybody else, except the contractor shall be considered as shown specified or implied. and shall be provided by the contractor without expense to anybody except himself.
2 If the work is done with no extra expense to the contractor then the work will be taken down and done again until the extra expense to the contractor is satisfactory to our engineer.
3 Our engineers plans are right as drawn. If something is drawn wrong it shall be discovered by the contractor corrected and done right with no extra expense to us. It doesn’t cut any ice with us or our engineer if you point out any mistakes our engineer has drawn. If you do it will be one hell of a long time before you do anymore work for us.
4 The contractor is not supposed to make fun of our engineer his plans or the kind of work we’re having done. If he does it’s just too bad for him.
5 Any contractor walking around the job with a smile on his face is subject to the review of his bid.
6 If the contractor doesn’t find all of our engineers mistakes before he bids this job or if the contractor hasn’t got enough sense to know that engineer is going to think up a bunch of new stuff that’s going to have to be done before the job is completely done then it’s just too bad for him.
7 The contractor must use all of the good stuff on this job none of this crap from Japan (well this was the 1970’s)