I’d been told for the last few weeks that we could be going to Baytown to do some vertical saw cutting. I was told there would be 8 of them. When I hear “vertical cuts“, the only question I have is “4 pits with 2 cuts each or 8 pits with 2 cuts each?”
I was told what the price would be. I don’t necessarily bid the jobs because the GC knows which prices will get the job and which won’t. He said he had one of his guys call around to get pricing in case I couldn’t make it there in time. I didn’t even question it, I just took him at his word. The price seemed fair to me until we showed up on the job the first day.
The cuts we were to make we not vertical, but horizontal! There’s a huge difference in price and the time it takes to complete the job. Of course the first thing I did was call the GC and told him about the mistake. He tells me, “I told you they were horizontal cuts, and I also told you what the price was!” He went on to say that, “I got quotes from several people and they were all within $150 of each other.” He agreed to pay me a little more and indicated that I was “robbing him.”
Now, when we were in Williamsburg, Virginia, I had some people come in and do some horizontal cutting for me. They charged me $360 per cut. Just to make sure they weren’t the highest people in town, I called several others. They were roughly about the same. I called some people in the Houston area to see what they would charge to do the horizontal cuts, and guess what, the average was about $315 per cut. The cuts are to be 120 inches long and 12 inches deep. (For you guys that saw cut) So what did I get to make the same cuts? More than $100 less! I could have left and not done the job, but then I would’ve wasted my time and my workers time. It would have been a wasted trip and I don’t travel 800 miles to turn around and go home!
In a phrase… “I got shafted!”