Tag:Tips
A Good summary on Green
Often I cruise YouTube when I’m eating lunch at my desk. The other day I found an interesting video from Belinda Carr titled The Hypocrisy of Being GREEN.
As I’ve discussed here before, I strive to sell Green that Saves Green, i.e. I’ll sell you a green option if it saves you money, not just greenwashing. I could very much identify with her comments towards the end about things that are added to projects to get green points on a score sheet that are actually wasteful and don’t advance any value to the building. If you’ve got 10 minutes to take a look, I think it’s worth listening to her explanations. She has some good points.
The Carpenter
An old carpenter about to retire is telling his boss about his plans to stop working in construction and enjoy life with his wife and kids. He is so excited about retiring that he wasn’t looking forward to anything else. All he wanted was to retire.
The boss was upset about losing a good worker and as a personal favor, asked the man to work on the construction of one last house. The old carpenter didn’t want to accept, but he couldn’t deny his boss one last favor.
He took the job, but it was clear that his heart wasn’t in it. Consequently he was careless and used inferior material on the construction of the home. It was a sad way to finish such an excellent career with so many years of total dedication to his craft.
When the house was completed his boss was there to inspect it. He gave the key to the house to the old carpenter and said, “This is your house. It’s a gift for you after so many years of hard work.”
The old carpenter was shocked. “What a shame!”, he thought. If he had known that he was his house, he would have done things differently…
That’s how it is with all of us. We construct our day-to-day lives carelessly without giving the proper attention to detail and then we have to live in the house we built. Afterwards we think that we could have done things differently, but time doesn’t come back. Too late now…
Remember that you are the carpenter of your own life. You construct your life a little bit per day – you hit a nail here, build a wall there and so on…
Author Unknown
ABC 2018 STEP Award
Easterday Construction Co., Inc. participated in the ABC (Associated Builders and Contractors) STEP (Safety Training and Evaluation Process) program again this year and achieved Silver Level status. Thanks to all our employees that made this possible.
CCMHS New Principal’s Office
Existing Media Room Office
During the construction of the new vestibule entrance at the Culver Community Middle High School, we were asked to duplicate the existing office in the former Media Room for a new Principal’s Office. This was a change order to the original project, but the goal was to keep it on a similar time line. The old office, shown to the right, was constructed using a block lower wall with hollow metal window frames in the upper area. The wire glass windows in the existing office are mostly obsolete technology at this time. Appropriate for the long term and reasonable to do during new construction in 1991, this proved to be an expensive add-on with long lead times and multiple trades involved.
New Aluminum & Glass Principal’s Office
We worked with the School to provide a better solution. The new Principal’s Office, shown to the left, has been constructed with a wood stud and drywall lower wall, dark bronze store front aluminum framing and an aluminum & glass door. It mimics the layout of the old office, but gives a more modern look. As a bonus, it was something that could be constructed quicker and at a savings of thousands of dollars. The office as pictured is nearly complete, lacking only the installation of a few of the window panes to wrap it up. We were pleased we could help with this solution.
Dress Appropriately
“Dress Appropriately” is the two word dress code at General Motors according to this article. In our current litigious society, where it appears HR department attorney’s are compensated by the word, I found this reduction to basics fascinating. It’s also refreshing to find that it seems to be working for them.
A friend from a larger company related struggles they had with trouble makers finding loopholes in their policies. One example he cited was an employee that objected to their policy that everyone wear hard hats. In protest, the employee childishly wore a hard hat strapped to his knee, citing the policy back to them that he was indeed wearing a hard hat. He would have had a hard time defending his action as dressing appropriately.
I don’t know if this is a solution to all things, but it refreshing to see the move to put responsibility for common sense back on employees, rather than treating them as imbeciles. As the article suggests, employees can, and should be expected to, think on their own… to do the right thing… to use common sense…
I am fortunate to have good people working here that I can trust to do the right thing… the appropriate thing… 99% of the time. That other 1%? We all have lapses in judgement, but they’re generally small and self-correcting after some good natured ribbing from their peers. “______ appropriately” could well be the correct policy for a multitude of things that fit in that blank.
Image borrowed from Keep Calm-O-Matic. You can purchase their products here.
