The right tool for the job..

I loaded up a one ton pickup with a pallet of bricks, a loader full of sand, 10 bags of cement, a mixing box, a mixing hoe and two shovels and a couple of buckets. The guys I sent out to do the job about 50 miles away were obviously not the brightest but I figured they could do the work.
It was building a 4 ft square box around a water meter in Knoxville, TN.  They had everything that was required to do the job except for a trowel.  I told them to pick one up at the hardware store on their way down and they left.

Around 6 o'clock they came back from the assignment (4 hours longer than I thought it would take) and I wished them a good weekend without saying anything about it taking them so long.

That weekend I went to clean out the one ton and during the clean out I found out why it took them so long.  In the tools I took out was a tiny trowel that was about 6"s long but no regular sized trowel was in the truck.

Monday, I asked the employee I told to pick up a trowel about it. He stated that a regular size trowel was 13.50 and the small one was only 7.50 and he was concerned with saving me money.  I asked him if he thought it wouldn't have taken so long with the regular sized trowel.  He said that they could have probably done it in half the time.  I asked him to consider how much money his line of thinking cost me and then the light bulb in his brain came on. He said he never thought of that!  I told him that the cost for 2 men working for 4 extra hours probably outweighed the huge savings on the regular sized trowel seeing how I usually bill the customer 30.00 per man hour but this was a contract and time was money.  

Oh well, next time I will have to either go along and hold his hand or spell it out for them in black and white...

Jim

The Adventures of SupaTrucka

So, here ya are. You have finished your training and you have signed a lease for a brand new 2014 shiny new truck. Your trainer had three months experience and you are sure that you now know everything there is to know about trucking. You can see yourself in a year from now owning a fleet of trucks and making a small fortune in the business. Your lease payments are only $900.00 a week so your'e sure that there will be plenty of money left over. The guys in the office told you that you can make $100,000.00 dollars a year with this truck. They seemed like honest folks and your sure they wouldn't lie to you.

So, you get all of your stuff and put it into your new truck.

C.B. radio with a 20,000 watt kicker and a curly cue antennae, check.
 Play station II, check.
 Pajamas to wear into the truck stop, check.
 Those little l.e.d. light to put in your windshield, check.
 G.P.S. to stick to your windshield, check.
Sirius Radio to blast heavy metal music with, check.
Now all we need is a high paying load to go with the new tractor and the easy weekly payments!so we wait for the combination dispatch tool/EOBR to do it's stuff....