Imagine working as an architect, and the client is super picky, requiring you to keep redoing the same drawings over and over again. Would you keep redoing the drawings as long as it took to make the client happy, or would you eventually say enough is enough?

In this story, one architect’s boss tells him and his coworkers that they have to do whatever the client wants. After a few months go by, the company’s directors want to know why they are spending so much time on this one project.

Keep reading to see how the story plays out.

Perfect Construction Drawings

I’m an Architect and when I was younger, I worked under a Senior Architect that would never listen to common pragmatic sense.

I was working with three other young architects and together we were responsible for producing a full set of construction drawings for a hospital wing extension that was 6 stories high.

Out Client was a builder and they had some demanding and stupid requests.

Over time, we could see that the builder was asking us to do a lot more drawing work than was necessary, when if the builder took time, they could find out all of the answers to their questions in the drawings we had already produced.

There were a LOT of drawings.

Now doing construction drawings is no small feat. This project probably had over 700 drawings. Each drawing was unique and each took at least half a day to produce.

We had a package of work to create room layout drawings. This involves drawing a plan, a ceiling plan and elevations of each internal wall face of every room in the hospital.

Each elevation had to show all of the equipment like basins, hand dispensers, desks, power outlets , tiles and so on.

The package of work took us over two months and we were relieved to see the end of it. There was over 400 drawings in total.

It seems that the builder didn’t know how to read the drawings.

The builder however had ongoing requests to add more information to each sheet.

The answers were all on the sheets but they couldn’t be bothered to look and needing information showing in a certain way.

We had many meetings explaining to the builder how to read the sheets but in the end the builder just complained to our boss the Senior Architect.

The Senior Architect made his decision very clear.

The Senior Architect called a meeting and said no matter what, we should do whatever the builder wanted to ensure he was happy.

I explained how the answers were all there but he just refused to listen.

I then spoke to him separately and said that changing, reprinting and mailing each of the 400 drawings whenever the builder made a request would take at least 2 weeks work.

He then yelled at me for wasting his time and said to do what I was told.

This means a lot more work.

So all in all, we probably had to change all 400 sheets about 12 times. And everytime we changed them we had to stop work on all other projects and all other drawings.

After 4 to 5 months of this, complaints started to coming in from other Senior Architects because our core drawing team were spending so much time on the hospital that they were neglecting their other projects.

Also construction of the hospital was being delayed in certain areas because none of us had time to focus on anything else.

Finally, the Directors got involved.

The Directors called in our boss, who then called us all in.

We explained the situation we had been put in and I showed them the huge lists of drawings we had issued and redone and redone and redone.

The next day, our boss met with the builder and we didn’t have to make any more changes.

I heard through the grapevine that the Directors lost a fortune in profit on the hospital because of all that wasted time and 2 months later that Senior Architect was first on the list for a round of redundancies.

That didn’t end well for the Senior Architect. Sometimes it’s best NOT to give the client everything they ask for.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This person shares a “rule” about customers.

Another person blames the builder and the Senior Architect.

This person understands the problem.

Another person questions OP’s math.

These changes could’ve gone on forever!

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