Do not open if you have OCD

[mikedt]

Here’s the corner of the same deck. One need not have OCD to blanch at this…

Usually for a bodge like that I'd say "Welcome to China!!". But this is in America?

 

[BrickHouse]

Here’s the corner of the same deck. One need not have OCD to blanch at this…


View attachment 167175

Oh my, Lord help me.
Can I make a request to find that individual and "larn'm some'n' the ol' way"?

 

[rootabaga]

A courthouse in Parker County, TX.
Sheesh.

 

[BrickHouse]

A courthouse in Parker County, TX.
Sheesh.

View attachment 167203

There's one worth a "browny button"!

 

[Clementine_3]

That is not the crooked door I'm looking for.

 

[rootabaga]

That is not the crooked door I'm looking for.

…but you haven’t yet checked out their droids…

 

[mikedt]

It's still there according to Google Streetview. And it's been leaning like that for at least 50 years that I know of. There used to be other wonky houses in the same row, but those were pulled down sometime in the 80s, and new straight houses built

 

[olbriar]

 

[Clementine_3]

It's either the bourbon or the bricks but I'm having a bad case of vertigo right now!!

 

[olbriar]

I trimmed a new home that the mason lost bond on a big front facing gable. It wasn't that bad but it was way obvious. If it were my future home, it would have been torn off the house and redone.

 

[ozonetrooper]

In a past life I ran a framing crew. At a new project I was going over the blueprints the night before to direct the guys the next day and found an issue.

One view of the house had both of the porches, lined up, (upstairs lining up with he downstairs porch, yet another elevation page showed the upper deck much shorter than the lower deck.

Next day I ask the builder, "which one are we building?"

blueprints are not cheap and an oversight like this is not supposed to happen.

lol

 

[ozonetrooper]

Then there was the house we built that had a peculiarity ... Going over the prints the night before I notice that one of the windows on the street side of the house, (most of the houses we built were on canal lots), had a window in a walk in closet.

Upon questioning the builder the next day I was informed to build it that way, the window was to balance out the look of that side of the house as the functioning widow would look odd by itself on that wall ....

Looking out the window from the closet seemed kinda odd to me but I was just the guy who pointed and yelled at the guys building it !

 

[BrickHouse]

Aside from the intoxicated masons, I'd say the architect may have been influenced by something as well. Of all the people involved in putting that structure together, it seems none of them made an attempt to provide a more symmetrical image.

Glad I wasn't involved in that project.

 

[The_Chief]

Long story so I'll hide it:

Spoiler

I was Plans Officer at the Naval Telecommunications Station in Bahrain, responsible for a $20 Million upgrade in our telecom capability to the Middle East warfighter. I had the Pentagon sending me emails! I had a DoD customer; a British contractor; a Bahraini subcontractor and Pakistani laborers. Not only did I have to translate UK wiring colors red/yellow/blue to US colors red/white/black, I had to be an ambassador to all these different people and cultures.

One of the trickiest aspects was the waveguide run carrying the high-powered radio energy to a massive dish inside a geodesic dome (to keep the humidity below 15% - if you stayed in it more than a half hour you'd get a nosebleed from the dry air). It could have no more than (classified) turns in the waveguide: so we had to place the transmitter in our new building in perfect alignment with the dish, way out there in the dome. If there were any deviations, it would reflect that high-powered radio energy back into the transmitter and burn it up (you radio folks understand how bad excessive VSWR is).

The waveguide would be buried for protection and only pop up from its six inch depth at both ends. The Pakistanis were hand digging this long waveguide trench from the dome back to the building (at least two hundred feet). In the heat of the day in Bahrain. All day, every day. My team and I were measuring from precisely where this transmitter was going to go (in a building only partially constructed) all the way out to the dome and the dish's planned emitter input port. I discovered that, just at the brick base of the building, their trench was off alignment by three inches. I pointed that out to the Pakistani foreman and he simply nodded his head, side to side in common Indian subcontinent fashion, saying "no problem, no problem"... while I was responding with "yes, problem!"

After pointing this out to the Bahraini boss and explaining how critical this alignment was, the poor Pakistanis, working in the heat of the day, had to re-dig that trench... just three inches over. No wonder I drank so much! The Pakistanis probably went home every night thinking, "oh, that American!"

(The good news is that all projects were finished ahead of schedule and under budget)

 

[ozonetrooper]

Inna past life I dabbled in two way radio, VSWR was not a big concern as much as SWR, I operated on a 360 degree omni-directional and a switchable verticle/horizontal rotatable beam :

 

[rootabaga]

 

[ozonetrooper]

 

[The_Chief]

Inna past life I dabbled in two way radio, VSWR was not a big concern as much as SWR

In a past life for me, I was the MARS (Military Affiliate Radio Station) station operator aboard our ship. While deployed we would call in to a ham radio operator in the United States and they would patch through to a crewmember's home phone. They could have conversations with their loved ones, hear their voices, get the latest family news. It was a great morale booster, and we had our own dedicated equipment and antenna. Shipmates aboard a deployed carrier in formation weren't as lucky: for their antenna, they had to measure out a long cable with a folding metal chair tied to the end and hung over the side of the ship. THAT was their antenna. To tune it to a new frequency, they had to haul the cable up or down and tap the transmitter to a shorter or longer cable. Ah, that fine Navy ingenuity at its best!

 

[ozonetrooper]

I used to make the joke that I needed more distance when talking skip so I would go out and flood the grounding rod with the water hose .... Me and a buddy did talk skip alot with my car backed up to a huge lake out in a cow pasture several times, ahhh the tricks we learn !