Note to the Reader : This blog is a continuation of a previous blog titled 'Work over Words'. It can be read independently but I would recommend reading that first. You can find the blog right here
As an architect we typically have to take on many roles - some of them obvious, others not so. Never had I imagined that this would also involve playing detective. I had mentioned earlier about a client who was in some amount of trouble due to the lack of proper documentation. Now when they have received the bills for the works quoted, it is nothing short of a mystery. The very first challenge was to decipher the bill itself. It was practically like a code that had to be broken into.
However, once we were able to make some sense of this, more mysteries came to the surface. How does one manage to quote for work worth 2500 square feet but order materials worth of 4000 square feet. Where does the rest of material go? If this is a mystery on our end, sure seems like a magical vanishing act on the other! The more we got into the details the more ridiculous the claims kept becoming. With the amount of sand that was claimed to have been ordered, one could turn the entire site into one large sand pit and still have leftovers. More and more missing materials kept popping up whose current whereabouts are yet to be discovered.
Today I felt nothing short of Sherlock Holmes going over the bills with a magnifying glass. A few of us sat and put together our deductive powers, reasoning and a whole lot of deciphering into this process. Finally we feel like we have got somewhere. But like I said earlier, this could all have been avoided simply by maintaining documentation from the very beginning. I won't have had a chance to snoop around like a detective but it sure would've been easier for everyone involved!
As an architect we typically have to take on many roles - some of them obvious, others not so. Never had I imagined that this would also involve playing detective. I had mentioned earlier about a client who was in some amount of trouble due to the lack of proper documentation. Now when they have received the bills for the works quoted, it is nothing short of a mystery. The very first challenge was to decipher the bill itself. It was practically like a code that had to be broken into.
However, once we were able to make some sense of this, more mysteries came to the surface. How does one manage to quote for work worth 2500 square feet but order materials worth of 4000 square feet. Where does the rest of material go? If this is a mystery on our end, sure seems like a magical vanishing act on the other! The more we got into the details the more ridiculous the claims kept becoming. With the amount of sand that was claimed to have been ordered, one could turn the entire site into one large sand pit and still have leftovers. More and more missing materials kept popping up whose current whereabouts are yet to be discovered.
Today I felt nothing short of Sherlock Holmes going over the bills with a magnifying glass. A few of us sat and put together our deductive powers, reasoning and a whole lot of deciphering into this process. Finally we feel like we have got somewhere. But like I said earlier, this could all have been avoided simply by maintaining documentation from the very beginning. I won't have had a chance to snoop around like a detective but it sure would've been easier for everyone involved!
-Mannat
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