removing yourself as the EOR 17

[SLTA]

Have any of you ever removed yourself from a project as the EOR, officially? I heard from a homeowner today that she and her contractor had greatly modified the methods etc described on my drawings, to the point here what they described may be unstable, and I don't want to be responsible for the project any more. (I was never told the project had moved past permitting stage.) I sent an email saying that no one can be in the house and work must stop until such a time as I see that it's safe. I'm meeting with her and him on Monday to see the condition they've created. I also have a call into the building dept, but they're closed on Fridays. Yep.

I'm curious to hear others' experiences. If the contractor and owner decide to build something totally different than what the permit set shows, with my stamp, am I still liable for issues, especially if they never told me work had even started?

What a great way to start a weekend.

Please remember: we're not all guys!

 

[darthsoilsguy2]

OSU this is how it works.... the person who follows will review your design comps and throw you under the bus to your former coworkers for each and every missing note... and maybe point out a few of your less conservative assumptions to your former boss to demonstrate their easy understanding of what took you so long to do..... OR.... they say the file is a mess and they can't figure up from down in it and get to bill # weeks reverse engineering you're stuff...

 

[OSUCivlEng]

Nah my boss will just slap his stamp on it and go on.

 

[BrianPetersen]

If that's what your boss does, it's his problem, not yours!

 

[SNORGY]

I said in a meeting once...to a client...
Work is that commodity that is so easy to criticize, and yet, so difficult to do. Ergo, you should be thankful that I am the one DOING it.

The same holds true for the incoming critics, whoever they might be.

Just recently, scarcely months ago, one of my former employer`s clients came, coincidentally, to the place where I was currently employed and asked them to review the design. The engineer who was assigned to it was one of my employees, and this individual immediately approached it with the bias that ``...this is wrong...that is wrong...what the heck were these idiots thinking when...``. Oddly enough, the work being criticized was, yes, mine, from when I worked at the old place. I spent two weeks, off and on, patiently explaining everything and the reasons why things were the way they were, and asked the engineer to run some process simulations to evaluate the equipment (a line heater) in question. A couple of hours later, the engineer came into my office with the results, which, oddly enough, agreed to within 2% with the calculations I had meanwhile done by hand on my white board and, also oddly enough, showed that the original work was indeed correct.

Lesson to be learned:

People ought not to be in too big a hurry to throw the originator`s work under the bus. By and large, most engineers are indeed not stupid, and there are usually very good reasons why even the things that look odd make perfect sense once you take the time to acquaint yourself with the bigger picture.

As for prototyping and then ``designing by Xerox all subsequent units``, every time I stamp something, it is site-specific, tag-number-specific, project-number-specific or tied to some unique identifier. That certainly creates some frustration for clients who want to ``design a typical and use it anywhere``, but it`s a position I don`t budge from. Not everyone`s line of work affords them that avenue (cars or machines, for example) but, if that`s an option, it`s the best option.

 

[IRstuff]

I supposed that it partly boils down to whether anyone, after the fact, can completely know what the assumptions and conditions the original designer used. Even in the case of an established building or structural code, there's almost always some interpretability involved, or even completely undocumented requirements. Given the lack of a comprehensive knowledge of the initial conditions, it would be rare for someone else to come up with the same design.

TTFN
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