We’re lucky we have a lot of laughs at our company – the team has fun both in the office and on our jobsites. It makes everything more enjoyable, and we’re big believers in having fun at work. Plus, you just never know what you’re going to run into during a typical day of construction. Sometimes you just need to laugh.
So just for fun, we pulled together the top five most ridiculous construction stories we’ve been part of – or at least the ones we’re able to share in this format.
To protect the innocent, we won’t name names. We also won’t confirm or deny if these stories happened at our company or if our team members experienced these at other companies. But we can tell you they are all true, no one was hurt, and retellings are all from firsthand witnesses.
In order of the least to the most ridiculous, here they are:
5: “We were almost done with our work at a drive-thru restaurant, and we were in the process of pouring wet concrete. We had construction signs everywhere and it was pretty obvious the site was under construction. Sure enough, someone missed every single sign in his desire to get something to eat, drove right toward the drive-thru, and got stuck in the wet concrete before we could stop him. Not only did a tow truck have to pull out his totaled car, but we needed to break up the concrete and then redo it.”
4: “I got a call from a client the week after their opening – on New Year’s Day – that the HVAC unit was out. It was a freezing cold day so I knew we had to move quickly before we had a problem with the pipes, but I couldn’t figure out what could have caused a brand-new unit to stop functioning. After some investigating, we figured out that a bullet, shot up in the air for a New Year’s Eve celebration nearby, fell to the ceiling of this city building and punctured the unit. As I said, you just never know what strange problems you’re going to run into. Thankfully no one was hurt.”
3: “I drove up to a jobsite and saw a bunch of subcontractors standing around outside, which is not a good sign when you know it’s not break time. Then out of the corner of my eye I see my superintendent walking towards my car. You know if your superintendent is trying to catch you before you walk onto the jobsite there’s a problem. He tells me that everyone is locked out of the jobsite. I look around and notice the locksmith’s truck is in the parking lot. Perfect, I tell him, pointing to the truck… the locksmith is here. He just looked at me and said ‘Yeah, the locksmith is the one who got us all locked out, and he can’t get back in.’ Amazing!”
2: “I was meeting a big group of subcontractors at a prebid meeting, and the owner forgot to leave a key for us in the lockbox. When I called the owner, she told me to just break down the door since we were going to be replacing it soon anyway. So, without giving my subcontractors a heads up, I pulled a crowbar out of my truck and broke down the door. They were mighty surprised to see what was going on, but I filled them in later. One of my subs still jokes that my prebid meetings are always interesting.”
1: “At the end of a concrete project, a subcontractor decided to dump his remaining wet (!) concrete into our dumpster. So not only did the wet concrete cure in the dumpster, I had to have the entire dumpster removed from the jobsite and discarded. Needless to say we have not worked with that subcontractor since.”
These are all true stories! There are a lot more where these came from, but these were the stories we were able to share on our website.
Don’t ask us who’s behind them. We’ll never tell.
