A Career in Construction Part 26

It was towards the end of my three month "holiday" that I took a phone call, through a third party colleague, inviting me to an interview for a job with Shepherd Construction. This was a little weird as I went for an interview with the same York based company back in 1972 when I was looking to leave George Wimpey. That time I was not offered a job, but this time would be different. An interview with the Southern Area manager in Watford was followed by one in York with the Company Construction Director and the Chief QS. I hired a Fiat Punto for the day (my company car had been embarrassingly collected on a low loader weeks before) and had a long interview at the Head Office.

I was then offered a job as a Unit Surveyor. This turned out to be the same grade as a Managing Surveyor, which title I inherited in due course. The Southern Area was a fledgling organisation, the office being some desks in the Company's small London office on Conduit Street used by directors and marketing people. I was to be site based, not far away on a office refurbishment on Cavendish Square, to begin with as the only QS. So on my first day on the 9th July 1996, I was back to where I was in 1972. Except this time my office was big enough for a desk and that was about it. How we were expected to work on site with the constant use of percussion breakers I do not know. The only concession was that the council limited this noisy working to three hours on, three hours off. There were times we just had to leave the site and give our eardrums a break.

But the job was great. The initial stages required much knocking down and breaking up of walls and floors. I remembered from my visits to sites  as a manager, that my QS's used to use coloured highlighters to show what was actually taken out. So there was I marking up drawings with my highlighter to use in the production of new schedules of quantities on which we were to be paid. These the client's QS never even checked. Most of my time was taken with placing Sub-Contract Orders, preparing valuations, remeasures and variation accounts. So I was grateful for some assistance when Joe started on 16th September.

That assistance was quite fortuitous as in October I was attending preliminary meetings for the construction of a new office building on the Bath Road in Slough. So through October and November I was looking after both contracts. I actually moved into the site office at Slough on 10th December 1996 but I still had overall responsibility for Cavendish Square. 165 Bath Road, Slough would be my home for the next 2 years. And although Slough took up most of my time, in 1997 I was also given a industrial contract for BOC at Wembley. The region had also taken offices in Windsor but it was always crowded. Towards the end of 1997 the company won the contract for the offices at 217 Bath Road, right next door to 165.

So I now had overall responsibility for both Slough contracts as well as Wembley and Cavendish Square. Into 1998 and an industrial complex at Southall also came under my wing. By the end of 1998 I was setting up the Sub-Contracts for another major industrial contract in Hayes. At the beginning of 1999 we moved out of the offices on Bath Road and moved to some tiny temporary accommodation that had been left at one of the Southall contracts. Not a very satisfactory situation. I was also given a role to head up a large retail complex in Epsom, but I had to strongly resist efforts to make me site based there. That journey would have been horrendous. In the end I took on the management of the QS team in the short term.

For most of 1999 I was dodging about between Southall and the Regional Offices in Langley, mostly putting out fires on all the contracts with which I had become involved over the last three years. There was a big claim to put together on 165 Bath Road Slough, lots of work on final accounts on Southall and Hayes and by the middle of the year Epsom  was in full swing  But in the September, I took on a completely new role. The man who processed all the Sub-Contract documents for all the region's contracts left the company and I took over his position. This did not mean I lost responsibility for the contracts with which I was involved. But I was office based once again, and would be for my last seven years at Shepherds.