japhy wrote: ↑Thu Dec 23, 2021 4:15 pm
Grievances; I’ll start since I have a recent one.
So the founder of our firm retired a couple of years ago and our firm turned 40 this year. The folks in charge of social media decided they should ask the “old man” 40 questions including what was the most favoritest greatest engineering accomplishment of his career. He mentions a project he had no meaningful contact with and didn’t want us to pursue. Our social media folks put this on our facebook page again this morning as “our bestest social media story of the year” and one of my partners reminded me it was back up with a big grin.
A party of four partners went to Santa Monica in 1997, the architect wanted to vet me as this was the biggest project any of our firms had undertaken. Since it was proposed that a 37 year old kid was going to be in responsible charge of it, the “old man” was there to add his senior gravitas to our contingent. As we were standing in the architect’s office looking at the giant model of the project the “old man” leaned over to me and the other partners and said, “I wouldn’t touch this with a 10 foot pole”. I took him at his word and applied for registration in Washington State the next morning and he never saw anything more of the project again until it was completed.
Last month the “old man” told his greatest career accomplishment story; about meeting Frank Gehry (true) and the technical challenges he conquered on the project (not true) and about personally naming a portion of the building (absolutely not true).
Right before our first meeting to look at the project in Santa Monica, the “old man” was regaling myself and the two other partners with a story of a recent trip to Chicago. At a certain time of the day, the sun reflects off a building and made a bright cross on a side walk on Michigan Avenue (probably in front of Gutter’s apartment). There were people there placing candles near the cross shaped reflection and saying prayers and calling it a miracle. As we were looking at the project model in Santa Monica I said to the “old man” and the other two partners, “there’s your next urban miracle, the Madonna of the Monorail”. After the “old man” retold the story of how he named the Madonna Wall in his social media memoir, both of the other partners who were there texted me, “that’s not exactly how I member that morning”.
This is the second time he has done something like this over the years. After the project opened, the local newspaper where our headquarters are located called our home office and asked to interview someone about the project. The “old man” volunteered to do the interview. Someone asked if maybe the press should talk to Japhy. The “old man” waved them off, he would take care of this. I heard nothing about it until one of my partners sent me a link to the article in the newspaper a week later and asked jokingly if anything the “old man” said was true.
Well; he did correctly name the architect.
When the project was completed I was going out to Seattle for the grand opening. We don’t normally go to openings but this project was a big deal for the firm and was getting national press. I told my partners I was taking the project engineer along, since he put 4 years of his life into making this happened and he deserved as much if not more credit than me. The “old man” chimes in, “if we send people out there for that we will eat up every penny we got paid on this, we lost a lot of money on this project.” The CFO chimed in, “we made 20% profit on this project, the most profit we have ever made, by hundreds of thousands of dollars, on a single project.” The “old man” replied, “oh, I didn’t know that”. Um, you just said you “knew” we lost money on it dickhead. We all agreed we could afford to reward my right hand guy for his work and booked his flight to Seattle.
The “old man” immediately booked a flight to Seattle for the opening as well.
When we got to the opening there was a VIP group that got to enter an hour or so before the common people. My name was on the VIP list and so was the project engineer’s ( and chiknbut who held the front door open for Noel Redding while he pushed Al Hendrix’s wheelchair in). But the “old man” didn’t make the cut. No one on the project knew who he was.
And the OCEA award we won for the project, the only one in our firm’s history, sits on my desk.
But as my partner sneered at me this morning, “you are still a little bitter”.
There; grievance aired.
