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