removing yourself as the EOR 20

[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!

 

[CELinOttawa]

Oh my GOD Snorgy. I thought I'd seen some sh*t, but that takes the cake! Just WOW.

 

[SLTA]

HO.LY. CRAP.

Please remember: we're not all guys!

 

[IRstuff]

OK busy posts


"We don't let nurses do it to doctors"

Yeah, we do. They're called nurse practitioners (NPs) in the US. With no more than a measly 6 months of clinical training, they are let loose on the populace, supposedly able to almost everything a real doctor does, but supposedly under the supervision of said doctor (yeah, right). My wife is a doctor, and has told me horror stories, including one where she had to make an emergency call to the patient to get their butt to the ER because the NP misdiagnosed the patient, on my wife's license and malpractice insurance.

" I get frustrated with non-credentialed idiots running engineering companies and having dominion over engineers"

I don't think that it's because they're non-credentialed that's the issue; it's simply that they're unethical and unprincipled. Identity theft is not a trivial matter, and you don't need credentials to figure that out. Yes, you had idiots, but they probably would have been idiots even if they had credentials, since credentials don't change your personality.


TTFN
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Of course I can. I can do anything. I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

 

[greenone]

SLTA-does your work qualify in your state to allow you to place a mechanic's lien on the house? Might want to do that, if possible, as leverage to get paid for your additional work.

 

[SNORGY]

In some of the southern States (one in particular comes to mind), it is rumored that a common criteria for determining whether or not to buy such a house is...

...

Whether it is new or leans.

 

[msquared48]

And why is this fiasco not before the provioncial licensing office? I would be on my State Board's ass to prosecute in a heartbeat here.

Mike McCann, PE, SE (WA)

 

[Ron]

SLTA....good job. You did it all just right!

SNORGY....thanks for sharing. I left a relatively high level position in an international engineering firm because non-credentialed "Project Managers" were given equal status to principal engineers and could override engineering decisions for the sake of expedience and/or profitability. That change was led by the accountants who infiltrated upper management and drove the decisions. I have never regretted the decision.

 

[SNORGY]

msquared48

There are two reasons why I didn't escalate this to the Professional Association level, one based on past experience and one purely selfish and personal.

(1) Past Experience: When I have been exposed to questionable practices in the past and have contacted the Association(s) for advice or guidance, I have been advised that they would not encourage me to formalize the complaint; in other words, they have told me they would rather not get involved - in one instance, I was encouraged to simply resign my employment and seek work elsewhere. I am not especially enamoured with the helpfulness of any of our Provincial Professional Associations, but "the law" requires membership within those Associations in order to practice engineering.
(2) Selfish / Personal: My wife and I simply decided that, on the basis of my employability in the marketplace, it was easier to just cut my losses and move on; we have better ways to spend or time than invite this level of conflict and drama into our lives. Yes, selfish, I know, but she is nonetheless affected in a corollary fashion by whatever conflict I bring upon myself.

You have to be very careful lodging formal complaints. In the words of Elton John and Bernie Taupin:

"I looked for support from the rest of my friends...For their vanishing tricks they get ten out of ten.". It is so true. Colleagues have families and fears and cling to their jobs and are disinclined to stand behind you in instances such as this, whereas the offending parties can simply disavow all knowledge of anything and deny everything, leaving the onus of proof on the sole complainant. You have to take stock and assess how difficult you will be making it on yourself when you become a whistle blower. Then, play the scenario out. What would a successful outcome (i.e., proving the validity of my complaint) have given rise to? Continued employment in an environment where my relationships with others in management and with colleagues are seriously compromised, surrounded by individuals who lack the same levels of courage and conviction that I have because the protection of their own personal circumstances trump standing up for what is truly ethical and right. You can't begrudge them, but sometimes you just have to take stock, look around, cut your losses and look for a place that more closely aligns with your own values.

 

[msquared48]

Snorgy:

That is pathetic regarding your regulatory agency - then it is all about the membership money to them and not about protecting the public - but I did have much the same experience when my stamp was stolen twice in earlier years. They merely a letter to the offender telling them not to do it again. Thst being said though, if it ever did go to court, that still was one apple on my side of the table.

It is interesting to note here that protecting the public is opur primary directive once licensed, but apparently not the licensing agency.

Best wishes, and thanks for sharing the experience.

Mike McCann, PE, SE (WA)

 

[fel3]

Snorgy…

I would be concerned that your previous employer and their "project manager" might still be using your stamp. Regardless, those people should be in prison.

Fred

==========
"Is it the only lesson of history that mankind is unteachable?"
--Winston S. Churchill

 

[TheTick]

[!]CAUTION: Potentially controversial statements to follow.[/!]

I am always amazed when I see any organization try to make an administrative fix to a criminal matter. The current issue of sexual assault on US college campuses is an extreme example. Why are colleges pursuing internal, administrative actions to address something that is clearly criminal and should be prosecuted by law enforcement, not sanctioned by some administrative body?

Likewise with the actions of the board in Snorgy's story. Clearly, this is beyond any simple breach of ethics. A man's identity has been stolen. It is a criminal act and should be treated as such.

 

[SLTA]

TheTick, cheers. I've always felt strongly that all assaults should be handled by the criminal courts, etc, but the reasons they aren't are long and varied. I think from the school's perspective, it's about keeping it all hush-hush.

There's a move to get the Princeton Review to include data on sexual assault rates in their rankings of colleges. A great idea, but I'm not holding my breath.

Please remember: we're not all guys!

 

[CANPRO]

Snorgy, as a young Canadian Engineer that is a truly disappointing story to hear. Thanks for sharing.

 

[TheTick]

I've been personally involved in Princeton Review's college rating process. It was embarrassing to be associated with it.

 

[SNORGY]

CANPRO,

Don't get discouraged. Follow your engineering ethics and your moral compass and you will be able to steer clear of those kinds of situations and those kinds of outfits.

TheTick,

I agree, but I was tired of the drama and the crap. In retrospect, a cop-out on my part.

fel3,

It was a result of this one very incident that the Provincial Professional Association involved made it much more difficult to skirt their "system". I also, now, insist on manual stamping of everything, using my own stamp and my own inkpad. The electronic CADD or .tiff image files of stamps that designers sometimes use to scale into their title blocks, they are definitely a thing of my past.

 

[fel3]

Snorgy…

Years ago I was a principal in a small civil engineering firm that did mostly municipal infrastructure design and serving as contract city engineers and special district engineers. We joint-ventured with an out-of-state firm (at their request) to do civil engineering for one of their major commercial development clients. They had no experience or, initially, licenses in our state and thought it would be best to team with a local firm rather than try to get up-to-speed all on their own. The three principals from each firm became the six principals for the JV. They transferred a couple of their employees to our location and we loaned a couple of our employees to get things started and then we hired locally as needed, eventually reaching about 25 people. I had no day-to-day role in managing the JV (one principal from each firm handled that), but I did get involved on a regular basis doing QC reviews and providing technical assistance to the JV's design teams (in my experience, most land development engineers are not very technically adept, so my help was sorely needed at times). I also chewed out one of the JV's senior engineers for blaming (publicly and loudly) my lead surveyor for a problem that was 100% his own. I found out it was not the first time this had happened and I would have fired him on the spot if I had had the jurisdiction.

Back to the issue at hand — The commercial development client required that all drawings be stamped and signed by the lead principal from the other firm, which made sense because they were his client for many years before the JV. However, that principal's normal schedule was one week in his home office, one week in our office, and one week traveling to project sites and visiting with local agencies. As you can imagine, this made timely stamping and signing of drawings to meet project schedules a real problem.

One day, about three or four years into the JV, one of the drafters for the JV asked me for a private conversation. He was concerned about their process for stamping and signing drawings, but he didn't know the regulations and wanted my advice. He told me that one of the engineering technicians (the first "designer" transferred out by the other firm) had engineering stamps for every state the other firm's lead principal was registered in (including ours) and a drawer full of sticky-backs with his signature. So, when the lead principal wasn't in our office, she could get the drawings "stamped and signed" and sent out just based on a phone call from him. The drafter wanted to know if that was OK. I told him "H*LL NO" and that it was illegal in all jurisdictions for a non-engineer to wield an engineer's stamp, not just our state, and signatures weren't legit because they weren't original. He told me that it hadn't always been that way, only the last year-and-a-half or so. They had devised this procedure to save a couple days on the back-and-forth required for FedEx, a final review, etc.

Based on my past dealings with the other firm's principals, which had started out good but were heading downhill, I decided that a grand gesture would be more effective than a typical protest. I told the drafter to wait until the designer went home for evening and to bring me the engineering stamps, the stamp pad, and all the sticky-backs he could find and that I would lock them in a drawer and wait for the SH*T to hit the fan.

About a week later, the SH*T hit the fan. The designer was frantically scurrying around the office looking for the stamps and sticky-backs and was having no luck. A couple hours into her scurrying, she decided to check on our side of the office since she had had no luck on her side. When she asked me if I had seen the stamps and sticky-backs, I said, "Yes, they're in my locked drawer and that's where they are going to stay." I then explained to her that what she and the lead principal were doing was illegal, that I hadn't worked so hard for my license to see it rendered meaningless by their procedure, yada, yada, yada. Her response was, "But, we have a deadline." I told her she was going to miss her deadline. In less than 30 minutes I was on the phone with the lead principal, who was even more furious, but I told him the same story. I also told him that he and designer didn't cease and desist, I would turn him, her, and the JV firm into the state for disciplinary action. Since the JV firm was a cash cow, this threat stopped him cold. The problem was fixed to my satisfaction and I did spot checks to make sure there were no lapses.

However, this was just one of the many problems with the JV that caused me to sell my interest in both firms and move on to other opportunities.



==========
"Is it the only lesson of history that mankind is unteachable?"
--Winston S. Churchill

 

[SNORGY]

fel3,

You went to the appropriate lengths - more so than I, faced with similar circumstances, might have done. You put your butt on the line.

I do regret not taking as strong a stand as you did, or as others have suggested that I should have in my circumstance.

I did, in my young and rebellious days, once write a letter to the then President of our Professional Association in response to an article he had authored in the Association's monthly newspaper. Every month, on page 3 of that newspaper, a caricature of the President's face appeared in the heading of the article. After 6 pages into my letter, my message was that I used Page 3 to paper-train my Rottweiler puppy, with great success. To his credit, he took it graciously and didn't punt me out of the Association. In fact, the article and my response were apparently posted in the Association's offices for about a year. The class he showed earned my respect, but although I might have matured a bit over the years, I am still not convinced that I am a member of an Association that is as committed to supporting its membership in the pursuit of measuring up to the very yardstick that it mandates itself to measure us by. Perhaps we are all conflict-averse by nature (well...not me, maybe...but I've paid for that over the years).

 

[fel3]

Snorgy…

I had the benefit of being a senior officer in both firms and having a financial stake in both firms, so I had a bigger stick to wield than you did in your circumstance. We all know money is important, but I get really frustrated with people who don't think integrity is even more important. That's one reason I didn't become an attorney.

==========
"Is it the only lesson of history that mankind is unteachable?"
--Winston S. Churchill

 

[darthsoilsguy2]

i've never been in the situation, but i would hope that a building official would revoke or stopwork a permit if a design professional of record walks in and says 'never heard of the job' until the matter cleared itself up...... if not so much that it would be the right thing to do.... but to protect their bureaucratic job....

 

[OSUCivlEng]

So how does it work if you leave a job where you have designed prototype structures that are repeated time after time? I may soon find myself in this situation. I suspect they will keep using my design and simply put another engineer's stamp on it. Come to think of it, I have several completed projects sitting on the shelf that have my stamp on them. It doesn't seem very ethical to just put someone else's stamp on something they never designed.