Imagine working at a job where you see your clients make the same mistake over and over again. You know giving them what they want is a bad idea, but they won’t listen. Would you refuse to comply, or would you simply make sure they know the consequences?

In this story, an employee who installs fire alarms is in this exact situation every single time he talks to a contractor. He knows the contractors are requesting something that’s a bad idea, but they just won’t listen.

Keep reading for all the details.

GCs always want smoke detectors too early, never listen

So this isn’t a specific story, but it plays out on every project I’ve ever been involved in, and when I say every project I mean EVERY project.

No hyperbole. Every. Single. Time.

I do commercial fire alarm systems, schools, hospitals, hotels, etc.

When installing a system in a new building you really don’t want to put the smoke detector heads in until the building is basically ready for occupancy.

There’s a very good reason for this.

The reason is dirt.

Construction tends to be very dirty, sanding, sheetrock, painting, flooring work, and everything else creates a lot of dust.

Smoke detectors internally are basically just a small LED light and a light sensor. If enough light gets blocked (say by smoke entering the chamber) it goes into alarm.

However, if the sensor gets too dirty, like say from a bunch of dust getting into it over the course of weeks or months, the detector will go bad. It will either go permanently into alarm or start reporting as dirty.

Either way you pretty much have to replace it.

Contractors just don’t get it.

For some reason, general contractors ALWAYS are hounding us to get the heads in as soon as possible.

More than once I’ve had to explain that I literally can’t put them in because they go on the ceiling and the ceiling hasn’t been installed yet.

On top of that though I always explain to them it’s a bad idea until an area is in an essentially finished state: floors down, walls painted all that good stuff. Put them in while it’s still a rough construction site and you’ll end up replacing half of them.

It’s a VERY common problem, so they’ve simplified the process for themselves.

Doesn’t matter, they always insist.

So we actually have a standard form we’ve made that outlines why we think it’s a bad idea but we will put them in if they want and THEY are responsible for the cost of replacements.

They always sign it and are always mad when we back charge them for the inevitable replacements.

You’d think the contractors would eventually learn that this is a bad idea after having to replace the fire alarms more than once.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

Perhaps the contractors would understand if he explained it another way.

This is a good question.

This person knows why contractors make this request.

Here’s an interesting idea!

There’s often a good reason for a ridiculous request.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.