The company I work for sells prefab steel building kits, which come in a variety of sizes ranging from 10ft to 100ft wide, 10ft to 25ft tall, and as long as you care to make them. One customer from New England had ordered a 20ft wide, 12ft high building and called me to find out about delivery. I explained that we'd ship when we were ready, and talked about adding some accessories. In the course of this discussion, I asked him what he was planning to use the building for.
"A place to work on my cars," he replied.
"Auto shop, okay," I said, and a thought struck me. "Are you going to put a vehicle lift in there?"
"Oh yes."
"Can I ask you, how tall is that lift?"
He said, "Fourteen feet."
Go back and look at what he ordered.
I have access to my phone records, including how long each call is. So I can tell you that it took me 59 minutes and 58 seconds to get the idea across to him that you cannot put a 14 foot high lift into a 12 foot high building.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
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1 comment:
I blame modern education.
He probably is a victim of the university physics class in relativity where they ask the question of whether you can fit the 31' pole into the 30' barn with both sets of end doors closed if you try to cram it in at the speed of light when the front doors open and the rear doors close behind it at the speed of light. Some variant of that yields the answer "it depends on your frame of reference."
That probably messes anybody up for life, without even moving on to the contemplation of quarks, leptons, pi-neutral mesons, dark matter, string theory, and the possibility that you could be (for an infinitesmal period of time) a fuzzy pink elephant according to quantum physics.
Hopefully you convinced him he needed the 20' or 25' roof....
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