Life is interesting…

Not too long ago I went out to teach someone how to install and commission a satellite for some remote monitoring equipment we use. This was about the same time California was getting dumped on with rain storms but we were lucky enough to not have rain on the day of the install. Everyone makes fun of California for over reacting when it rains here, and it’s true we do. However consider this; we don’t have the infrastructure to support more than an inch of rain at any given time. It happens maybe once or twice a year so it’s just not fiscally wise to build anything with heavy rain in mind, so when we do get that one or two days of heavy rain a year everything suffers.

I say that because the satellite we installed was on the top of what is often called a green belt. It is sort of a no man’s land between two backyards. There was a fence to open it and it was 30 feet wide or so. I drove my truck up the hill in four wheel drive then my friend followed me who I was training in his box Van. The Van got stuck. He tried a total of two times and I tried once but it wouldn’t go up the hill. We tried pushing it with the truck and still nothing.
The grass was soft and muddy, so we loaded everything into my truck and I made it up the hill.

We more or less gave this area a lawn job, but I didn’t think much of it because I thought my company owned it. In 6 months time grass would grow back over and no one would notice. The problem, we didn’t own it. Apparently it was private property and no one told us in advance. Now I have a meeting about it and my boss, his boss, another boss… lots of bosses are calling us telling us we shouldn’t have done it. Well you know what, hind sight is 20/20. Sitting here looking back we shouldn’t have done it, but at the time it seemed like the right decision. They are telling us we should have just packed up and gone home, on a perfectly sunny day, and done the install another day.

I’m not worried about losing my job over this I just don’t like making mistakes, any kind. I feel bad about it but I don’t feel we deserve the kind of brow beating myself and my co-worker have been getting all day. Guess what, my company can easily afford to fix this. Fix it and leave me alone.

So hindsight is 20/20. The problem is management like to pretend that they would have made the same decision prior to the incident.