I had an interesting one many years ago. We were designing a small mechanical tower on a power plant site that because of the overall dimensions was going to have fixed base columns attached to the foundation (drilled piers with pier caps). I had a call from the field engineer at about 3pm on a Friday afternoon (always when you love to have calls of this nature). He had been wandering around the jobsite that afternoon basically killing time when the contractor called him over to where the pier cap was being worked on. He pointed out that the lower plate washer on 3 of the anchor bolts was interfering with the rebars coming up out of the pier and asked if he could cut the bars off. After some discussion between myself and the field engineer I told him to tell the contractor that he could cut 3 of the bars but no more than 2 adjacent to each other. This was obviously somewhat bogus advice in that there was only one spot on the pier circumference that had the interference problem with the 20 or so total rebars around the pier.
A couple of weeks later, again at around 3pm on a Friday afternoon, the same field engineer called me. He asked me how many bars I said the contractor could cut. I flipped the question around and asked him how many he told the contractor. He indicated he told the guy zero, figuring that if he told him 2 the guy would say how about 3, if he said 3 how about 5, etc. My next question was, how many did the contractor cut, and he told me 4 or 5 all in row. (Keep in mind this story is some 35 years old so the exact quantities are a little loose in my mind now.)
Ultimately we worked out an acceptable alternate solution so that everyone was happy, but it certainly pointed out to me, the young engineer, how much attention one needs to pay to certain details to insure that they can actually be produced in the form that we drew them.
