This was your brothers number 1 customer you were chewing out?

Ok, now that you have explained it, I have been in manufacturing - both heavy and light - for a long time. This sounds like something that wouldn't even be remembered the next day, once we worked it out. If this problem sets you off to the degree that it did, you should probably consider becoming a pro fisherman.

Yes I did.

But that is another long, convoluted story for another day.

By customer, I mean soul sucking leech taking advantage of my brother's generosity and inability to tell anybody no to suck years of life and any hopes of a sound financial future from my brother. Once my brother is burned out physically and financially, he will find the next sucker.

Best thing that could happen to my brother is to dump this "customer" like a bad habit.

Disclaimer: my brother is high functioning autistic, and is easily taken advantage of, but a damn good at what he does (metal fab). If he got a job as a traveling welder, he would have more money then he can spend instead of being late for bills constantly because his "customer" never has the money to pay him.

How many times did your boss schedule you to be working in 2 states at the same time, and expected your brother to do the job for no pay? Oh, your brother has his own company which he had to shut down for half a day to help out.

Then your brother arrives at the job site to find there are no tools.

This a great story.  OP doesn’t have the correct equipment when everything is a phone call away.

Op let’s the same thing happen over and over and expects different results.  Wonder if he knows what that means.

Please more screaming op.

Attached File

Eh, worst ass chewing I ever got involved a retired armor Colonel sitting very casually in a chair, leaning back with one arm on the meeting table explaining to us in a conversational tone exactly how we fucked up and that if we fucked up again he was going to fire us all.

He never raised his voice, and all of us were convinced he was staring straight at us the whole time. I'd been there like two weeks. Good times.

"Insubordinate and churlish. "

OP, sounds like you need a few cold beers and quiet night out on the pattio with your dog. Maybe a few logs in the firepit.

 But the reality is it will take the driver a lot of money and time to sue, and he will never really get paid up on everything he will end up losing if he can't get ride of the load.  It isn't his fault, why should he be the big $$ loser?

Refuse the fucking load.  Make it his problem, don't solve it for him.

How much is that 15000ish pound industrial shredder worth?   Seems like the shipper and receiver need to get this figured out - and the trucking company fire both?

Doesn’t sound like it would be my problem, or even my business.

Toxic people only take advantage of those that let them. Stop enabling.

Haha. I’ve cost my employers WAY more than anything your guy did.

I remember the first and second biggest ass chewings I’ve handed out to different contractors.

The first one was last year in Panama City  just after the hurricane and I was called in to assess the damage/structural integrity of a shopping center roof. There was a loud-mouthed New Yorker storm chaser with a FL contractors license he probably borrowed from his brother-in-laws cousin running a crew of Mexicans doing emergency repairs.

He had them break an extension ladder down into two pieces and was making them use the part with no feet on it to jump between roofs, and didn’t have it tied off to anything.[for the record, I’ve seen someone fall and shatter their femur doing that exact thing] I tried to gently point out that his “ladder” wasn’t going to fly and he could get his people hurt or killed, but he basically told me to pound sand and mind my own business. So I threw his half-ladder off the roof from 30’ up and told him he was a fucking idiot and was going to get one of his crewmen killed with his disregard for basic safety rules, and we could fight about it if we had to. We did not have to. He drove away to go buy a real ladder that wouldn’t kill someone. His workers weren’t going to speak up out of fear for their job, but I fucking will, before he kills one of them.

The second one was a sub whose contract I had oversight for in DC, but lacked the authority to outright cancel/fire since it was a .gov thing. Most of my subs ranged from tolerable to outstanding, but not this one - they stood apart from all others in their miserable lack of dependability. I called him with a simple task for a job on a small roof: “provide a quote to repair open roof membrane seams, as needed.” I’d already walked that roof and it had like 30 linear feet of open seams throughout the whole thing, the rest was tight as a drum.

That fucking scumbag sent a repair crew instead of an estimator. They [poorly] stripped in EVERY seam on the roof, about 3000 linear feet, with an adhesive repair tape that’s not even suitable for that type of roof. Then they sent me a bill, not an estimate, for about twice as much money as the job would have been worth even if they’d been authorized to do the full scope of what they did. I later inspected their work and ripped off about 20’ of their “repair” by hand in one pull on an edge. It was such a joke.

I don’t recall exactly what my email to their CEO said, but I basically called him whatever is below pond scum and told him that he and his crewmen, who were fucking crackheads, were not smart enough to be morons.

I like that part in bold. I'm going to keep that one

i deal with subcontractors everyday.  ive given my fair share of ass chewings, never fun but some people make life and work too damn difficult and need a reality check.

Thursday I had a sticker in my sock and I took my shoe off on a roof. OSHA violation.

The Friday before I tied my roof harness to my truck instead of nailing into the shitty trusses I was required to. It isn't a violation to nail into substandard support, you just have to nail into the support. It is a violation to tie off to a truck. OSHA violation. My insurance guy stopped by, he gets it.

If you have walked onto a construction site, 9 times out of 10 you were a walking OSHA violation.

I understand your pain. I get subs that schedule deliveries and expect to have a lift to unload it, no one from the sub company on site to receive it. I tell them, look at your contract. YOU are responsible for all receiving, lifting, unloading, hoisting etc. whatever it takes to get your shit on the job & in place is up to you. I’ll usually send it back if I can. That usually fixes the problem.

Wrong. Ain’t that hard.

When you don’t do any work.

But my point was that normally, if the property owner/project manager/etc isn’t a moron, you own your fuck up when you start violating the rules.

But it sounds like OP was doing this as a favor. Which is probably worse.

As to the ass chewing, I have given my fair share in similar situations as the OP.

Now, the situation in general.
1) This happens all the time due to lack of communication from ALL parties involved. Sure, there was a scheduling screw up. But a few simple phone calls could have had this solved before equipment was even loaded.

2) I haul big heavy things for a living. Before I even load something, I make damn sure I have point of contact info for the destination along with working out final details for delivery and unloading. This also means the point of contact has MY info, that way any issues can be resolved.

All that said, the company I work for are VERY versatile, so when our customers drop the ball, we have the equipment and experience to handle any issues that arrive. Given all that, due to the nature of what we do, problems happen all the time.

I can't tell you how many times I have done a run, and had comms with all parties involved on what EXACTLY needed to happen, and yet it still turned into a shitshow!

For example:
When I delivered the 80ton AC unit, actually weighs 14k, it was a shitshow due to the rigging company NOT HAVING THE CORRECT rigging gear! I made a call, had one of our HD wrecker/rotator operators swing by with PROPER rigging gear.
So, you would think that when it was time for the 80ton AC unit needed picked up people would have their shit together. NOPE! This time, the rigging guys had gear, but the tower crane had been removed from the jobsite weeks prior and they tried to do the lift with a Broderson crane, in which they brought that was TOO FUCKING SMALL to do the lift. This time, I again called one of our HD wrecker/rotator operators, kicked the rigging crew off the site and did the lift ourselves.

It would have been nice for this to be a proper company. Fuckwit is a single man operation, having only my brother as his slave hired sub to do all his dirty work and skilled labor.

Its the sorriest excuse for a heavy machinery by/sell/manufacture operation you have ever had the displeasure of seeing. NOT my brother's fault, he does his part. But my brother is my brother, and its his business on the line too, so I've been asked begged to help on a couple occasions when they put themselves in a pickle.

The "excuse" is the shipper (this thing was bought sight unseen) claimed the entire unit (all 5 assemblies) weighed only 10k pounds COMBINED.

NO

FUCKING

WAY

When you start looking at the unit and counting the number of pieces of steel that are 1.5" thick x 2 feet wide by 8 feet long, and there are MANY of those plus MASSIVE I beams, not fucking way. A mere glance of some pictures from a moron would know otherwise. But to borrow a phrase, fuckstain isn't' smart enough to be a moron.

The driver says the load was grossing between 35k and 40k, based on his air gauges (you can get an idea of weight based on how much air pressure it takes to lift it). A couple of the assemblies were rather light, skid loader and forks handled them zero issue at all.

I did call and say the excavator could not just lift it. "nothing can get there today" was the answer.

Yeah, shit sandwich, but the big looser would have been the truck driver. Maybe I shouldn't have cared, but I do, because I'm nice like that.

I totally understand.

My suggestion to you, or perhaps your brother, is to search out HD wrecker outfits that have "rotators". (The term rotator is a HD wrecker that the boom will rotate 360 and slide forward and back on the wrecker body.) Most all HD wrecker companies that have that type of equipment also do simple lifts like you experienced, and usually can deploy in a quicker time frame than an actual crane and rigging crew.

Hell, the company I work for currently has 4 rotators one which is a twin steer axle beast, and a new second twin steer axle beast is arriving within the next couple of weeks.

Never happen.

They are trying to peddle tech and machines that have no value. They are not needed by anybody. Anybody who could possibly justify such a machine can't justify the cost. They are trying to build and sell machines that take metal shaving fluid from CNC machines, squeeze the shavings into pucks so the lube oil can be extracted and reused, and the shavings are clean to be sold for scrap. Very expensive machines.

Problem is the advances in water soluble cutting lube means all that isn't needed anymore. Drop the fluid into a vat, filter it for reuse, give the pile of shavings a quick wash to become acceptable to sell, and sell as a container of shavings for the same price/ton. No expensive machines to extract and puck the savings. Just a container and some water. The cutting fluid lost in the process is cheap when you buy it in bulk, just can't justify these machines anymore, and this morn keeps buying more and more to part out to build new ones he can't sell

The only way they get any orders is too sell these things damn near at cost.

But this guy leads on my brother, for the last 5 years, that they will take off and make them rich. Because my brother has autism, he just can't see it and is getting dragged down with dipshit.