I have been declared as incompetent by the same client three times in my career. I find that somewhat odd, given that they keep asking me to design more stuff for them, and it always works.
On one occasion, with this client, my incompetence was proclaimed by a plant superintendent because I delayed a start up by one day, and I used that day to have a contractor complete some small bore piping welds before we started to bring gas into the plant. The part of the story that the client left out was the part in which one of the two operators had asked me to hold off on the start-up because the other operator was too drunk to help him start up the plant. I, meanwhile, didn't want to expose a construction crew to any risks arising from trying to start up a gas plant with a drunk operator.
The superintendent was never told *that* part of the story, and my employer (the EPC firm) instructed me to never mention it either, because it would be in the best interests of all concerned to maintain a good working relationship with a valued client. I was told that it was politically correct, ethical and professional for my employer to state to the client that the delay was due to my inexperience as a project engineer and to leave it at that. I was, thus, scapegoated, my time was not reimbursed and I was banned from future work on that client's projects.
I suppose, at that time, perhaps "timid" would have been an adjective used by some. Looking back on it, I think I just took a bullet for the team, because in the words of Jack Nicholson, "You can't handle the truth.".
Twenty years later, if I was in the same position, I would have told the contractor to demobilize all of his personnel for the day, hopped in the foreman's pick-up and driven the three hours down the forestry trunk road to the nearest inhabited town or village, and left the client to do whatever he wanted while we were gone. My days of taking those kinds of bullets for the team have passed.
Regards,
SNORGY.
