It was for a job building a road on a landfill extension. We'd submitted the documentation and had been invited to the post-tender interview. We'd been in there about an hour and it was going fine but when we got to the health and safety part they started grilling us heavily, asking the same questions over and over again. You report all accidents to the health and safety manager? None in the last 12 months, you say?
Eventually they moved on but when it was over they came back to health and safety and asked again: No reportable accidents in the last 12 months? No, we said, because there hadn't been.
And that's when they produced photos of a tipper lorry on one of our sites with a badly smashed cab. Apparently the lorry had gone under an overhead gantry with the tipper raised, bringing the gantry down on to the cab, trapping the driver and cutting his head. It wasn't too serious but he was taken to hospital after the fire brigade had cut him free. The gantry carried water across the road to the water treatment plant so there was a hell of a mess. It happened during the tender.
We tried to get out of it. "That's a road traffic accident," we said. "We don't report road traffic accidents." But there wasn't much to say. They'd been setting us up and we didn't get the job.
We were furious with the road transport manager. When we got back to the office we saw the same photo blown up on the wall. "Why the **** didn't you tell us?" we said. He thought for a minute. "It's a road traffic accident. We don't report road traffic accidents..."
PFI Friday
We were processing a major PFI bid due on the Monday morning. We were up against it and the 300-plus documents would have to be produced over the weekend.
The specially ordered, bespoke, tabbed PVC dividers arrived on the Friday morning and were dispatched to a reputable company to punch holes in them to fit our ring binders. Simple stuff. But when they were returned to us at 6pm that evening, the dividers had been drilled en masse and the heat had welded them all together. They were unusable.
We spent the best part of the weekend painstakingly cutting each divider out with a scalpel. Many were ruined but we salvaged enough to complete the client copies. A classic case of taking the simplest job for granted.
At your leisure
Two colleagues of mine who shall remain nameless attended an interview to get on the list for a £2m project. A presentation was prepared showing our expertise in the leisure industry (sports halls, pools, etc). The only problem was that the project was for the external refurbishment of a block of flats! Needless to say, quick thinking was required. A quick adjustment to our tactics, some apologies, a few red faces and extensive ad-libbing sorted it out. We made the list!
What's in a name?
After spending a lot of time preparing a PowerPoint presentation for a major blue chip client, we did the presentation at their premises. After going through a number of slides cleverly demonstrating how we had re-created their corporate logo on the big screen, one of the interviewers kindly pointed out how we had repeatedly spelled their company name incorrectly, making the mistake of writing it how it was pronounced.
Apologies made, we failed to win that particular contract.
Two plus two makes five
After negotiating the refurbishment of a block of flats with a local council, we went to the pre-contract meeting, thinking we had 10 floors to refurbish, as per the drawings. I mentioned that I'd ordered 52 doors and the housing officer said there were actually 57 flats over 11 floors. After several minutes of arguing how many floors there were, it turned out that the 11th floor had been missed off the drawings. At the back of my mind I remembered my site manager saying there were 11 floors, but I'd dismissed his concerns, thinking he must have counted wrong. We still carried out the work, but the client had to cough up an extra £20,000.
Bad reception
We delivered a tender to the reception desk of a client only hours before the deadline. We were confident it would be received in time as it had been taken to the departmental reception rather than just the front desk.
Unfortunately, somewhere along the line our package got lost in the administrative wastelands and we missed the deadline. An unsympathetic client rejected our excuse and our tender. We've learnt our lesson and now get timed receipts as a matter of course.
Return to sender
I was working for a subcontractor some years ago and we tendered for a job to a main contractor. Their idea was for us to include a self-addressed envelope in the package so we could get an answer back from them on whether we'd been successful or not. It wasn't something we'd done before, but they asked for it so we were happy to go along with the request.
However, our receptionist who sent the package off put it in the self-addressed envelope instead of the one addressed to the client. We got the tender back the next day, all excited, before realising what had happened. We missed the deadline.
Source
Construction Manager
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