Construction Calamities - 10 Hilarious On Site Stories - Brook Hi Vis

Construction. Labouring. On the tools. The life of a tradesmen has many ups and downs. There is always money to be made, and always a laugh to be had. During your earlier years, you may find yourself to be on the end of many of these said laughs, after all, the apprentice is always the butt of the jokes. But as they say, it’s “character building”. Throughout your career as a tradie, there’s no doubt you’ve came across a few construction calamities, so after compiling many stories from the job, we at Brook Hi Vis have put together ten of the best stories to come out of the building game for you all to enjoy! Get your safety helmets on, because you may end up falling over laughing!

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Construction Calamities: Swamp Boiler

“Recently my mate the plumber was drilling in to an old boiler in an old ladies house, 99.999% of the time he has his labourer drain the tank. This time however he forgot to drain it, so he drilled in to the tank and a stream of disgusting rank black water burst out all over the old ladies cream carpet. All he could do was shove his finger in the hole he made but his phone was out of reach. So he stood there for 3 hours until the old lady came home and by that time his finger had swollen up and wouldn’t come out of the hole. He had to get cut out by a fireman and ruined the poor old ladies floor.

He didn’t get paid.”

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Construction Calamities: A House With Bad Bowels

“When I worked for Sky I went to a house to install a system, it looked alright pulling up in the van, but when I got out there was a faint but terrible smell of rotting waste. I knocked on the door and the second the bloke opened the door the smell hit me like a freight train, it was like a years worth of rubbish rotting into a base layer of dog poo and wee. I walked into the house to do the installation and the carpet was saturated and squelching brown round my boots.

Knowing I’d have to kneel on the carpet to drill through for cables I made my excuses and left before calling head office and telling them that I wasn’t doing the install and no other engineer should be sent out due to the state of the house. I was so disgusted that I went to screwfix and bought new boots.”

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Construction Calamities: Wasting Water

“As a former electrician myself I have a few horror stories but the absolute worst I’ve heard of was a friend of mine who is a plumber for a London council.

He gets a call out to a residence to unblock the bath, when he arrives he finds a women and her two kids at the flat. This women cant speak a word of English and he later found out her and her family had recently moved here from Somalia. So he heads into the bathroom and as he opens the door hes hit with a smell he described to me as “Someone slapping me in the face with poo”

He looks in the bath and it is filled to the brim with sand, he tries to ask the women why its filled with sand but she cant help for obvious reasons. So she calls her husband who can speak a tiny amount of English and he explains that he needs the sand changed.

Basically, they were doing their business in the bath and then covering it with sand and they thought he was there to remove the sand so they could continue using the bath.

Due to the lack of water where they moved from they couldn’t imagine using the toilet and wasting all the water when you flush it, so they didn’t.

My mate promptly called his boss, explained the situation and left. He never found out what happened after that.”

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Construction Calamities: Sign Of Danger

“We were almost done with our work at a drive-thru restaurant, and we were in the process of pouring wet concrete. We had construction signs everywhere and it was pretty obvious the site was under construction. Sure enough, someone missed every single sign in his desire to get something to eat, drove right toward the drive-thru, and got stuck in the wet concrete before we could stop him. Not only did a tow truck have to pull out his totalled car, but we needed to break up the concrete and then redo it.”

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Construction Calamities: Spoiled Celebrations

“I got a call from a client the week after their opening – on New Year’s Day – that the HVAC unit was out. It was a freezing cold day so I knew we had to move quickly before we had a problem with the pipes, but I couldn’t figure out what could have caused a brand-new unit to stop functioning. After some investigating, we figured out that a bullet, shot up in the air for a New Year’s Eve celebration nearby, fell to the ceiling of this city building and punctured the unit. As I said, you just never know what strange problems you’re going to run into. Thankfully no one was hurt.”

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Construction Calamities: Angry Wife

A log home builder visits his client, a successful businessman and his attractive trophy wife, to collect his final draw. The builder notices as he drives up that finish crews are giving him sheepish grins from the protection of their trucks instead of working, which is odd for this time of day. But the front door suddenly flies open and the spitting mad wife makes it clear why. She arrived with a final load of small items to move in when she discovers that the entire finish crew was performing their work while wearing her thong panties… on their heads.

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Construction Calamities: The Zoo House

A timber frame builder reports that a recent wealthy client wanted to renovate and expand a historic timber frame home. The problem came in the form of their pet prized chimpanzee, Thibedeau. “They insisted on living in the home during the renovation. Although they were traveling a lot,” explains the long-time timber framer. “Apparently, it’s hard to find boarding for a chimp. This meant we ended up taking care of it. And that was one mean monkey.” Chimps don’t deal well with changes to their environment. To help soothe the animal, the contractor built a “chimp condo” away from the main house. A sanctuary from the construction fury.

With the owner absent, workers began drawing straws as to who had to escort the chimp to the condo, since it would often bite workers or hurl its faeces. Eventually they began leaving Thibedeau in his condo full-time, bringing it food and water each day. Although surly, Thibedeau was smart. His dexterous chimp hands allowed him to escape.

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Construction Calamities: Catching A Bus

Building a Swedish-cope, handcrafted, log golf clubhouse in Istanbul, Turkey, presents its own challenges, reported a longtime U.S. log home builder who was contracted for the job. First, the language barrier was formidable – only the builder and the owner spoke English. The U.S. builder began calling Turkish workers by names he made up, which were not always complimentary.

Next was the lack of modern tools. “It was like working with carpenters from 2,000 years ago,” he recalls. “I asked for a forklift or a boom truck to position these huge 14” beams. The owner says (imitating Turkish accent) “No forklift! I give you 90 men!’ Do you know how crowded a subfloor can get with 90 men?” Taking inspiration from the Egyptian pyramids, the U.S. builder created ramps to get the logs into place. “It worked. But it’s amazing no one was hurt or killed,” he says.

On a rainy day when the temperature was hovering around freezing, the builder wanted to cross the street but was too tired to walk down to the crosswalk. So he crossed the southbound lanes, mounted the cement barrier between lanes and waited a moment to clear his glasses of rain drops. His vision obscured by a tree, the builder nonetheless jumped down into the northbound lane and was immediately struck by a fully loaded city bus. “The bus threw me as far as a human can be thrown,” he recalls. But the horror wasn’t over. “With all the rain and all the people on the bus, the driver couldn’t stop. It hit me again.” This time the builder hung onto the front bumper to keep from going under its wheels. The bus finally came to a stop. A passing taxi driver dragged him into the backseat and rushed him to the hospital. Amazingly, he had no broken bones and his thick clothing protected him from road rash. “The doctors couldn’t believe it. I went back to the hotel and had a drink. Then I went back to work the next day.”

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Construction Calamities: Naughty Kids

Bob Fraga, VP and regional manager of MBP, recounts a story of a high-profile renovation project. It was on the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, DC. He worked with an architect who wanted to bring more natural light into the building. He did this with several skylights and a “grand glass staircase.”

The architect’s vision was approved and admired by everyone involved with the project. The team built the staircase as planned. Within a week of opening, however, Fraga received a phone call asking him to bring tarpaulin to the museum.

He soon found out that young boys had been standing underneath the glass staircase to look up women’s skirts. As a result, the museum needed to temporarily cover up the staircase with a tarp. They later modified the stair design to rectify the problem.

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Construction Calamities: Seagulls

When building a federal courthouse in New York, the building faced an unexpected consequence. The architects chose a pristine white exterior — which was their design trademark — for the court house building. However, it was located near the Long Island Sound, which is home to scores of seagulls. Shortly after opening, the super-white exterior of the building transformed into a shade of grey. The birds nested in the building and pooped all over the structure.

And there you have it, construction is a crazy world! If you work in the industry, just be prepared. Something like the stories told here could very easily happen to you! If you want to buy the products that inspired these stories, please click here. Whether you’re a plumber, an electrician, or a carpenter, make sure you take the highs and the lows and the job with a smile on your face! So get up, have your coffee, pack your kit into the van and go to work singing!

Construction Calamities: 10 Hilarious On Site Stories Plastered On The Web

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