Re: A few more for Nick!

["Just Looking" <Spam@xxxxxxxxxx>]

What about when you "red tag" a fire alarm and send the required paperwork
to the AHJ? Even made a follow up phone call to make certain the letter was
received by the AHJ? Wait, it has been 5 years and the place is still in
business and the fire alarm panel still has that same red tag right on the
front of it. That good old boys club has lots of members besides just the
installers and maintainers of fire alarm systems.
Even better; I was at a meeting of a fire alarm association held in a city
owned building. The building's fire system had a red tag on the fire alarm
panel. I personally took the Fire Marshall over to the panel and asked him
why it has had a red tag on it for nearly a year. He craw fished and acted
as if were my faux pas for pointing it out. He said that only installers can
remove the red tag and it should be done by the next inspection period. It
is a year later and the tag is still there.
If things are this bad with regulations, how bad could it get without any?

"Jim" <alarminex@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:27f6c3e0-ed79-4096-a876-0882ac41540f@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Sep 15, 8:19 pm, JoeRaisin <joeraisin2...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> I am more cynical than you - I believe they ARE capable of identifying
> an incorrectly installed control. They just choose not to. Could be
> laziness, could be their instructions.
>
> This is one of the reasons I think that fire alarm inspections should be
> performed by a third party. Installers may make more of an effort if
> they know that their work will be inspected (thoroughly) by someone who,
> A) knows what they are doing and B) ISN'T their buddy.

Some time ago, for a short while, I was all for having any/every alarm
system inspected in the same manner as is required by the electrical
and other building trades. HOWEVER, since that time and over many
years, I've come to see that it's all talk and show and very little
action. It seems to me that the so called "inspections" generally fall
into a few categories.

1/ If you're new in the trade, the inspectors are real hard on you for
quite a long time. It's sort of like an initiation into "the club" so
to speak.

2/ After you've been around for awhile, and the "inspectors" get to
know you .... and your work style/ethic/standards, they don't do as
thorough a job of "inspecting".

3/ After you've invited them out to lunch or dinner a few times, the
inspection amounts to the "inspector" getting out of his car, standing
in the driveway, looking at the building being worked on, filling out
a check list and then driving away.

4/ Once you've given them holiday gifts, bottles of wine or booze,
game tickets, a weekend in the Pocono's, you can then ask them to
ignore certain things on jobs that otherwise wouldn't pass
"inspection"

In the meantime, the installations of the company get sloppyer and
sloppyer since now one now has to meet any standards. Ultimately it
all depends on the standards of the owners or managers of the
installation company. If they keep to high standards they usually
can't compete fairly with those who don't. Then it all gets right back
down to word of mouth and reputation. And that leads us right back to
where we are right now.

So now ..... as you can see, I don't think that inspections in this
trade will serve any purpose other than to create another non
productive, useless, for show only, adding expense to jobs, by people
who are not responsible for the things that they miss or who don't
know enough about what they are "inspecting" .... or are just to damn
lazy to explain things to you .... so as to help you out  But .... for
the right people, they can make rightly questionalble things ..... "
disappear".

Trade Inspections work sometimes but .... in my opinion, not often
enough to make it worth having to deal with the people who will
eventually turn their jobs into a "rule over a dominion" bureaucracy
run by the enforcement of rules depending upon "if they like you ....
or not" And again .... THEY ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE THINGS THAT
THEY MISS!


>
> I know that the company I previously worked for frowned upon making a
> service ticket for an installation error I found during an inspection
> unless I could spin it so that it was billable. If I could correct it
> without taking too much time I would and call the installer later and
> give him crap - a lot of it required a service tech to come out and mgmt
> would give me crap for writing the finding down on the inspection form.
> All but the service supervisor - who used to say, "I'm glad you're on
> our team." Some of the things I found had been glossed over by the
> previous inspector - I can only assumed he had been sufficiently cowed.

This sort of proves my point(s)


>
> I wonder if that had anything to do with my being fired for wrecking a
> truck...-

But you weren't fired for failing to do your job. Truck wrecking is an
accident, not intentional dereliction of duty.