Old foreman in Cleveland told me to stop wetting my bricks

He said it was slowing me down and making a mess on the scaffold, so I fought him on it for a week until a hard rain soaked a whole pallet and I had to work with them wet anyway. He was right, who knew? Has anyone else been given bad advice they stuck with too long?

3 comments

3 Comments

val_williams1mo ago

Most of the time the bad advice comes from people who learned the hard way but can't explain why. They just say "do it this way" without the backstory. So you fight it because it sounds like nonsense. Then you waste a week of your life proving them right. It's the same with everything from cooking to car maintenance. People hand down rules without context and we either blindly follow or blindly rebel. Neither approach works great.

bell.felix1mo agoOG Member

Yeah isn't that the truth? The worst part is when you finally figure it out and you're mad at them for being right but also mad at yourself for not listening. I've started trying to ask people "okay but why does that matter?" when they give me advice like that. Usually they pause and either admit they don't know or they actually explain the reason and it clicks. Most people just repeat what they heard without thinking about it. And then you get stuck in this loop of wasted time because nobody can be bothered to give the full story.

logan_young291mo ago

Honestly @val_williams that's a good point about not knowing the backstory. What do you do when you ask "why does that matter" and they just shrug or get defensive?