"Are You Fricking Serious!?" Engineers' Moments

architects engineers and craftsmen of reddit what wishes are customers you had to refuse because they defy basic rules of physics and or common sense property wanted us to evaluate the condition of their boilers and determine the best course of action what they really wanted was for us to say yeah you can fix those up for a few more years went out with a boiler inspector who condemned the boilers on the spot we informed them the boilers were not safe at all to operate and needed replacement immediately they wanted us to amend our report to say everything was okay we refused and they decided to stop contacting us i got to watch this gem of an email chain over the course of a few days last year i'm glad it wasn't me i'm not sure i could have remained as professional as my colleague the paraphrase to protect the innocent contractor hey the inspector failed my work because i didn't construct this for your detail can you remove that detail from the plan thanks engineer that was needed because of the anticipated load the owner will put there after construction contractor but we didn't do it that way so can you just pull the detail and tell the owner not to put the load there great thanks engineer number contractor why are you being so unreasonable the inspector won't give us a pass until you remove the detail we've already finished the construction at this point the office manager stepped in om sounds like you need to get out there any restart construction contractor but that would be really expensive it would just be easier for us of you change the plans in the contract document so we didn't have to do that om well maybe you should have followed engineers plans in the first place we're forwarding this email chain to owner i'm sure they'll be very interested in your new delayed schedule before work complete as an inspector this sounds about right do it right the first time please i don't like having to reject work but i'll sure do it what do you mean you can't cut 60 percent of the weight out of this design while maintaining the existing 6x factor of safety and since you're making it lighter it should be less expensive too tell lamborghini that truss roof design we had things like that all the time it's odd having to tell an architect that the stamped blueprint still need to have weight transferred to the ground at some point the worst i saw was a do-it-yourselfer that had almost completely removed two attic trusses so they could make a bigger stairway and wanted us to tell the inspector it was okay i once asked an architect if he wouldn't reconsider a couple of details of his railing and egress prince because the fire marshal wasn't going to approve it for occupancy he said you are a stupid welder and i am a degreed professional build the freaking parts to print and stop calling me i was back the next week undoing and then redoing something that should never have been approved worked in a woodshop once or upon an age ago a lady comes in and asks for a pine thingy for her yard guy she's talking to says no pine will rot there you'll need teak or something a bit more water resistant especially if you're going to bury a bit of it she was having none of it five carpenters came over to explain to her how certain woods are better in wet areas she wanted pine well we had lost pine and cca pine but we weren't getting into this as we knew she'd come back in a few months back asking for a free repair or a refund she didn't get her product from us and i doubt she got anyone else to make it either when six professionals come to you to say the exact same thing maybe consider their words or at least just google it when six professionals come to you to say the exact same thing maybe consider their words or at least just google it honestly as someone who used to be a retail computer repair guy many moons ago it still baffles me that people will come to a professional for advice and then explicitly ignore said advice i work in the packaging industry and i've lost count how many times a client requests something along the lines of i want my package to be better hopefully i can get some good graphics printed on it and i want it to be cheaper so i can raise my profit so you want something better than your stapled together film rap but at the same time you want it to be cheaper sounds like my boss not an engineer but i used to work on a project which allocated funding for budding entrepreneurs with good ideas for projects i had one guy who was adamant he wouldn't talk to me at all until i signed an nda but wanted big money funding our general rule was we won't sign anything unless we knew what for so we managed to get a rough idea of what he wanted funding for it turns out it was a perpetual motion machine that used magnets to spin a turbine exception it had no way of extracting power from the system my boss actually used the line on this project we obey the laws of thermodynamics he never got his funding rich couple just bought a fancy new place and brought in a fairly well-known interior designer decorator dude walks into the living room and the first thing he says is omg this place is just perfect for a fireplace you must get one build right here couple agrees because they have more money than sense and will agree with anything as long as they think someone has some level of authority or knowledge problem is the place they bought is an apartment on the fourth floor there were six floors in total there is literally no way to put a fireplace into this apartment without making massive structural alterations to the building and i do mean massive they couldn't even get a price estimate from any contractor because the work required to figure out the structural alterations was extensive enough to require a price estimate in itself your price estimate is going to be so ridiculous that it's going to require a price estimate just to find out i'm going to have to use it one sometime defense contract the sales engineer sold an optical rocket tracking system for use on a desert coastal test range and it wasn't until i showed up for testing and started astronomical self-calibration that i realized in the summer the desert heat drives a standing dust cloud that starts at about one kilometer altitude and reaches about two kilometers altitude and flows outward until it precipitated into the sea a few km offshore we could not see through it it was impossible the only time the system was usable was either very late at night or in the winter when the dust cloud went away but the system was useless the sales dude did the site visit in the winter from a customer why did your system fail you said it would not fail due to a power outage we did not have a power outage amy correct you did not have a power failure our system failed when it was electrically shorted due to excessive humidity the server was under six feet of water that would do it so an older neighborhood is being gentrified and the developer decides to get in on the act buys two older one-storey store france and plans to make them into one building for a restaurant bar so far so good he hires a well-respected architect to design the space and he decides not to remove the wall dividing the two old stores which share a common truss roof but to remove parts of the wall to create windows and leave the wall portions between the windows as supports restaurant opens and isn't much of a success because that part of town is still sketchy restaurant fails and building stays empty for a year or so new guy buys restaurants and decides he needs more space so he hires new architect to do something about those windows in the center wall new architect decides to remove the wall completely and replace it with circular iron columns for that retro steampunk look and to keep up a little support for that old truss roof this restaurant fails because the food was horrible third guy buys the restaurant and decides that those iron columns are ugly and takes them out on the advice of some builder who said that trust roof is good for that span after building inspector had okayed the new work plan which indicated no change to the central supports builder was one of those guys who hires casual labor in the parking lot of a home depot a sanitary inspector arrives one week before opening to check on kitchen sees that the columns are gone goes back to his office and calls building inspector who rushes out to check on things condemns building as unsafe third owner goes bankrupt and the building was torn down about six months later i watched all this from my office window and got inside reports from the owner of the bar next door it was the most fun about that particular job i'm surprised i'd think in a gentrifying area the land cost would be worth infinitely more than a one-story retail building you can't ask for more software features and get the same release date when we're already working overtime to hit the one we have none of the above but i did work electrical app minutes midwest hardware store for a while i'd like to think i made a few contributions and prevented a few people from burning their houses down like the geniuses who having lost power wanted to hook their generators up to the exterior utlets i told them they could do that and they would hear a pop followed by smoking plastic and rubber the second the power came back on my favorite was the guy who wanted a warming lamp for his shower he had his can and his bulb all ready to go when i asked what he was working on as i looked at his supplies not only was the can not wet rated but it was rated for only 75 watts he wanted to put in a 250 watt incandescent bulb i explained using small words that either his insulation the frame of the floor above or the can itself would catch fire or melt and then he would have no shower and quite possibly melted plastic on his head sheesh i worked for a small traditional upholstery company the owner was a antique dealer interior designer type with no formal qualifications and definitely not a traditional upholsterer definitely a chancer some of our clients were world famous designers he promised a design that was impossible he just couldn't understand that you can't float springs on thin air but insisted that we make it it was a very long time ago so as i recall the frame had been made but without any ability to put webbing where we needed to which is what you usually tie the springs the company ceased trading not long after as a network engineer the number of people who don't understand the speed of light has a pretty dang hard limit when it comes to network late and seeping times that is to say the further you move the client away from a server the higher the latency has to be at one point i did a back of the envelope calculation of the speed of light through fiber and the distance between two of our data centers and came out with 45 milliseconds as the absolute lower limit if i could run a single uninterrupted strand of fiber across most of the us i can't do that of course so the 60 ms cross country they were complaining about was really the best we could do similarly as we move some data center services into the cloud of azure or oars a lot of service owners seem unaware of how additional latency will slow them down until the move starts happening chemist here my company sells among other things windshield washer fluids to brick and mortar stores one of our products is a 5 gram tablet that one can put in their car's windshield washer reservoir and fill with water which will produce blue detergent solution for cleaning windshields one big difference between the liquid and the tablet is the liquid can have varying amounts of methanol which provides antifreeze capabilities by lowering the freezing point of the water methanol mix you need roughly 35 by volume methanol to get to the typical freezing point of -20 f enter sales and marketing they ask if we can develop a tablet that can make anti-freeze claims they still want the tablet form and for it to weigh 5 grams they tell us this would be a game changer because it's expensive to ship water i tell them it is not possible because the amount of methanol 5 grams of tablet could encapsulate would in no way depress the freezing point of water in any appreciable way they respond with but it would be a game changer me to myself if we can alter the laws of physics me i'll look into it over two years later i still get questions about whether we can do it in a previous job i was asked by a customer and my manager to design from scratch something that was a way outside our wheelhouse b was beholden to numerous fire safety codes and c already available from dozens of vendors in more recent times i've been told by internal customers that they didn't like the design of a medical device because of the color i chose to render it in solidworks during my co-op doing design engineering one of the designers read people who do the aesthetics not the structural work blasted me during a design review because i had colored a stainless steel panel green and mineral green and mineral green and mineral green and miral green and miral green and miral green and miral green in i was once asked by my project manager to take two versions of the same document about 25 000 words each and compare them highlighting the differences because he was not i.t literate his intention was naturally for me to do it manually representing probably several full days of work at a time when we had other work coming in constantly when i used them as word comparison tool and printed the document out with all the differences automatically formatted and highlighted which took about two minutes rather than two days he said i was trying to overperform and that i was over thinking it you should have milked it for a couple days while playing on the internet former patent engineer here not me but guy at the desk next to me was asked to write a patent for an inventor who had a perpetual motion device everything the guy had made sense all his math the deceive etc except for the fact that he simply could not comprehend the fact that friction exists and prevents the device from working in order for an invention to be patentable it must be novel non-obvious and useful by definition a perpetual motion device is not useful because it does not exist no you can connect 10 servers and 12 switches and 4 3 000 what ups is to a single 220 volt 15 amp connection we need to bring the electrician back and i need work with and we will most likely need a new breaker panel as well since this is an old building and panel looks full well you can connect them but if you want them to work well now that's an entirely different story hey you know that old unit we've had you guys make for a decade which works perfectly fine well we'd like to have a snazzy updated version we want more functionality more controls a built-in computer instead of simplistic basic controls its own wi-fi double the tank capacity and make everything more compact the old one did like one thing really well so make this one do three different things at least the old ones cost about twenty thousand dollars so we like the new one to cost less but there's been about four different meetings of them demanding this last i heard there hasn't been any progress on the project why do i need to keep these sheer walls for there hasn't been an earthquake since 1994 i work in the los angeles area true story mega rich couple are building a new 25 000 square featuring house 18 months into the project their interior designer begins adding very heavy elements to the plans that the structure is not engineered for tempers flare a new structural engineer is hired at this point the house is ready for sheetrock roof is on etc new engineer raises doubts here we go that the structure is built for specifications and undergone proper materials testing and inspections despite what the records show owners lawyer up builder lawyers up destructive testing is agreed to determine the integrity of the foundation which fails five percent of the cause taken settlement ensues owner has the whole house torn down and has the excavation filled in walked away architect wanted to use these specific high bays in a classroom setting these fixtures were rated for 42 000 lumens each which is essentially like harvesting the power of the dang sun to light a room with a nine feet ceiling they were confused when i told them that was a poor idea you missed a chance to say it wasn't a bright idea i was once asked to proceed forward with a drop ceiling set four inches from the finish floor above because that should be enough for beams and wires and pipes i was once asked if our firm could do a small commercial kitchen for less than a quarter of what it would cost all while the guy griped that it was unnecessary that he should have to build a fire rated wall or higher engineers for his structural work full stop but none of that beats the time i was given a set of schematic drawings by a loner drawn up by freelancer to proceed into design development and somehow neither one noticed that the stairs from one floor to the next were not even in the same location the freelancer is used to designing video game levels i guess potential customer gave us a very enthusiastic pitch for their unoriginal device the unique selling point being that it would last like 10x longer on batteries than all the existing ones on the market whilst being the same size price etc when we asked how this miracle would be achieved the answer was that we just buy a better battery like apple and samsung and tesla etc had never thought of just using a better battery in their products i would actually buy a new phone if the main selling point was we sacrificed thickness for a better battery roughing in electrical in a block building i made up a piece of pipe to go from a receptacle 18 inches above the floor and turn out of the block wall above the ceiling the mason told me the pipe was above the roof double and triple check the plans the ceiling was higher than the roof my father is an electrician and was doing work at a walmart and ran five circuits through one pipe walmart said he needed five because there was no way he could do five circuits and one pipe after arguing with them for a half hour he ran five pipes only one of them has wire in it i find this hard to believe only because walmart would more likely tell him to run no pipes at all just free air the wires through the trusses and save a few bucks walmarts are built very cheaply general contractor here a lot of people are just so delusional about what stuff costs a lot of people have a budget that is just so inadequate for their project a lot of times their budgets are kind of just pulled out of thin air or they are using rule of thumb costs from like the 90s i am very wary of any owner that hasn't had anything built before or recently don't want to have them waste a bunch of your time before the project is scrapped due to costs someone asked me to make a wooden hand cart with a canopy to use at a market to sell some homemade crap they looked up prices online and expected me to make it for the same or less than an mdf cutout display piece from china 150 pounds would barely cover the material costs i worked on a giant complicated system for a government agency that pulled polluted groundwater out of the ground sprayed it into the air making it into air pollution did i digress then pumping the cleaned water back into the ground they wanted to control the spray system from the state capital city so an expensive remote system that worked over the phone lines was installed there is a lot of summertime thunderstorms so a lightning detector was installed to protect the remote system from lightning strikes by sensing an approaching storm taking the whole system down in a controlled fashion and disconnecting everything from the phone lines the thunderstorms also often knocked out the power so after that a gigantic backup generator was installed a system almost the size of a railroad box car the generator was immensely expensive but was finally installed completely during a meeting my business partner said um why is there a generator for the system when the lightning detection system has already taken the whole system down and shut everything off dead freaking silence um well you bring up a good point there that's something we're going to have to look at once we got an order for some stainless steel tubes with overlapping head and od tolerances but no cold out wall thickness we sent them an empty box and they sent us a revised print i want you to make a program that anyone can log into for golfing it keeps track of their scores and sends them to a database no i can't fund a server why would you need one host it off their laptop and warn them that if they ever close the lid the site will go offline concrete walls and lighting um you should have thought about that before you pour your concrete if you didn't want surface mount i work hvac we get airflow balance requests all the time well upstairs is a couple degrees hotter than downstairs yeah heat fricking rises civil engineer here a colleague once had to do the statics analysis of a huge but reinforced concrete hammock an architect designed inside a living room of a family house of all the material that i would build a hammock out of concrete doesn't even come to mind that doesn't sound comfortable at all i work for a large financial institution and we've had multiple members ask us to update our mobile app to allow them to deposit cash and not just checks going over an electrical single line diagram for a project i noticed the building has a 240 volt single phase electrical service through some magic the other end of the line had a 208 volt three phase panel i had to call the engineer to ask where i should find the other wire electricity is already magic if you had looked at the complete plan that wire ran over a very detailed summoning circle that would take care of that conversion hydroelectric turbines in the ca aqueduct he couldn't wrap his head around the fact that the aqueduct is pumped up hill and he wanted to put hydro turbines downstream from there works fine as long as you're not the guy paying for the pumps surely i feel like i'm that bad customer at the moment i need to replace a piece of equipment with one with 10 higher capacity under worse feed conditions while still sitting in the same footprint there is a very narrow band of things that can be altered to make this possible and it may not be i want to express to them that i'm not deeply entrenched and that if they can't do it they can say that openly and we'll change other parameters to find something that works but so far i've just gotten radio silence out of them as if they are debating how to respond to my stupidity internally before applying o0 radio silence from a machine builder integrator usually isn't a good thing open a line of communication generally the more communication on projects like this the more comfortable everyone feels as the project goes on [Music] the amount of main contractors upgrading pumping stations that needed to be told just doubling the size of the pumps is no good unless you also doubled the power supply was farcical try and pull 120 a through a 100 a fuse see what happens i would send at least one of those emails a month they always reacted with surprise freaking civil engineers go dig your hole once had a client who was very into renewable energy and wanted all the lights in their car parked to be powered with renewables they however hated solar panels because they are too ugly they instead wanted a geothermal plant in an attempt to demonstrate the impossibility of this exercise i roughly did the calculations for how deep we would need to dig in that part of australia we don't have an active volcano on the entire mainland 12 kilometers deep a 12 kilometer deep hole and subsequent power station to power the lights for a 100 car parking lot needless to say they didn't get what they wanted wanted a geothermal plant mayo i love engineers did the calculations just to prove how impossible it was i had a vp ask me after construction outside our building cut a fiber line if we could just use some electrical tape to fix the fiber line this is after he removed fail over 4 grams and fail over internet due to budget concerns civil engineers have a saying the best utility locator in the world is a contractor on a backhoe part of my job is doing design and drafting for a millwork company the amount of times people have wanted a cabinet above their island with zero walls ceilings touching it baffles me we literally installed a cabinet on airplane cable hanging over her island because she insisted over and over again the ceiling was a good 16 featuring above the island the things weighed for featuring with a slight breeze she called back and asked us to remove it we did for iffy another lady was insistent we use environmentally safe glues for all of our mill work we only agreed if she waved the warranty because the environmentally safe stuff may be safer for fish if it ever got into the ground water but it doesn't freaking work she got an ikea kitchen a few years later when it all fell apart if you are new to the channel you can subscribe i publish new videos every day until then check another video [Music] so bye for now

Channel: Updoot Everything

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Keywords: are you serious, engineering, engineering fails, absurd demand, rules of physics, common sense, #updootst, updoot, reddit, r/askreddit, askreddit, ask reddit, best of reddit, reddit stories, reddit story, top posts, funniest posts, funny, funny posts, funny reddit stories, funny askreddit, reddit funny, askreddit funny, askreddit stories, people of reddit, sub, reddit cringe, memes, toadfilms, updoot everything, updoot reddit, story, stories, rslash, comedy, fresh, reddit stories 2020

Id: PIjOkUVaCa4

Length: 26min 39sec (1599 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 21 2021