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This is a question Bodge Jobs

If you can't fix it with a hammer and a roll of duck tape, it's not worth fixing at all, my old mate said minutes before that nasty business with the hammer and a roll of duck tape. Tell us of McGyver-like repairs and whether they were a brilliant success or a health and safety nightmare.

(, Thu 10 Mar 2011, 11:58)
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I'm an architect, and usually a very thorough one.
I was working on plans to a building for a client, a huge job and very early in my career, so it was make or break. I had spent weeks of 12 or 16 hour days on these plans making sure everything was perfect. In my line of work, if you screw up a project you don't get many second chances. I had everything drawn up, structural, electrical, facade. Everything except HVAC, and no matter what I did, I couldn't get one hot air vent to fit where it was supposed to go. I had everyone on my team work on it, and short of an entire redesign of the plans, nobody could find a solution.

In the US, there's an old saying, "good enough for government work." Because government projects are built by the lowest bidder, many times contractors use bodge jobs to save on costs. I didn't want to be one of those people, but it was a government building we were designing, and we had run out of solutions, so we said screw it and fit the exhaust vent where it really shouldn't have gone and submitted our plans.

Imagine my embarrassment when not even a year later, I heard some terrorist shot a missile into the vent and blew up the whole building!

Apologies if this has bindun a million times already.
(, Wed 16 Mar 2011, 20:01, 2 replies)
heh
Might have been ... but not as well.

*Clicks*
(, Wed 16 Mar 2011, 20:04, closed)
You are a bad person and must be stopped.

(, Wed 16 Mar 2011, 20:33, closed)

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