The Around Friday Problem
Verbal agreements run into trouble not because people are dishonest, but because not everyone is in the same room at the same time.
I learned this on a bathroom remodel job. The owner wanted the bathroom done by the following Friday. I said I could do that — depending on when the tile shipment arrived. That's a difference that mattered: by Friday versus around Friday. Nobody wrote down that conversation, but it wasn’t the only thing that didn’t work out.
The interior designer was handling the tile order. Standard practice. But they underordered — no allowance for broken tile or mis-cuts on large format tile. I ended up being two tiles short. Re-order took two weeks. When it arrived, the color was slightly off.
The customer was not happy.
The designer pointed at me. I pointed at the order. Nobody had anything in writing. Nobody recorded the conversation in which the Friday expectation was set, or the one in which the designer took responsibility for the tile order.
Small job. Good intentions all around. Big bad taste at the end.
What went wrong wasn't the work. It was the conversation. Three parties. Multiple conversations that happened at different times and different places. The owner's expectation — done by Friday — never got stress-tested in a room with the person who needed the tile to arrive first.
This is how most construction disputes actually start. Not fraud. Not incompetence. Just conversations that happened separately, with assumptions that didn't connect with reality.
What I do differently now.
When a third party is involved — a designer, a supplier, another sub — I record the key conversations. Not secretly. I tell people: "I'm going to record this so we're all working from the same information." Nobody objects.
When the tile arrived, and the order was short, I spoke with the designer to confirm the order quantity. When the customer asks why it's not done on Friday, I have the recorded conversation I shared with them. I said around Friday, not by Friday, and the contingencies and dependencies are spelled out.
But this really isn’t about winning an argument. It’s to avoid having one.
But what a hassle to write that up. Who has time?
Well, not anymore. ONDA Replay is a voice recording app built for exactly this. On-device, private, searchable. [Available on iOS and Android.]
I can record the conversation (with the client’s permission) and generate a transcript at the end in a few minutes. I can email the client a link to it. We can both review it and see if we missed anything.
They can share OUR conversation with other subs, and we can all get on the same page and hopefully have a LOT fewer problems