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The working man makes work

There is a song with the chorus "The working man makes work for the working man to do". The song may have been tongue in cheek but it proves the saying "Many a true word is spoken in jest". I am sure everyone can think of an example.

In our case we had our house renovated a few years ago and every time a tradesman completed his task there was a mess left for the next tradesman to have to avoid. We visited the house everyday and cleaned up the mess in an attempt to keep the renovation on time. It didn't work and our builder still managed to find $20,000 of extra charges as well as taking 35 weeks to complete what he said would take 14 weeks.

To save money we did the painting and we did most of the work before the flooring man came to lay the new floor (5 weeks late). The floor took about 7 weeks to do (it was a 10 day quote) and the floorers managed to put holes in the walls and ceilings which we had to patch and paint over. It is of little consolation that the floorer went out of business soon afterwards as he didn't do a very good job. All the knotholes in the floorboards were filled with a glue and sawdust mix and then sanded and oiled. Most of these fills have come out. The final indignity is that the floorer used plywood between the floorboards and the cement slab and then charged extra for the plywood. He should have used a special underlay as we now have a very hard floor which kills your feet if you don't wear shoes.

On the way home from work I passed the top half of a a Hills hoist (clothesline) at the side of the road complete with all the clothes pegs still on it. The next day someone had removed the clothes pegs. The fact that the clothes pegs weren't removed BEFORE the Hills hoist was removed is not a surprise but is further evidence of the lack of pride that tradespeople have in their work. Why bother to do the job properly - close enough is good enough and the sucker will have paid before the "cut corners" are discovered.

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