skylar18 said:... a story for a completely different forum!
That is the frustrating thing about the permitting process here, they complain about being under staffed and overworked, but then they make it so they have to review each permit multiple times for crazy reasons. I appreciate that they are trying to protect us, but it sure is frustrating.
I decided it was more polite to rant in this subforum than to add any more inspection stories to the Texas pool build thread (he did start it though) - which looks to be turning into a very nice pool and I don't want the pictures interrupted by too much ranting. But oh my... even days later the thought of idling an excavation crew for two days because the paper work wasn't posted yet at 7:30am yikes. And as I thought about this I realized that over the years I've run into dozens of really crazy things during permit and inspection.
What are your worst tales?
I must say that FL is actually better in many aspects since (as noted in the other thread) Texas takes 2 weeks to approve a plan and NJ takes an astounding 21 days between plan submissions... at least in FL (Orange county) they accept the plan, review it and pass/fail it on the spot. You either leave with a permit or an assignment to get some new bit of plan update or paper or whatever. And they have a computerized check-in system that made my wife nuts! She got there at 7:45am to be first in line for a minor change submission and got to watch all the plan inspector have coffee and hang out. The receptionist informed her she could not be seen until 8am and the system would not accept her name until 8am... so for 15 minutes she sits there and the inspectors all sit there. At 8am she goes to the receptionist and says "now please"? So the receptionist types clicks, clicks and says please wait for your name to be called. She goes over to the row of inspector desks and no one says boo... she waits, they sit there, she waits. After several minutes she goes back to reception and says, what's going on? Reception says oh... I guess your name went in just before 8am, it shows here but does not show up over there, let me put it in again. Type, clicky-clicky and wait. And again nothing. So back to reception... who says hmm - your name is now here twice! but not over there. We need to delete you from the system and add you back. But when we delete you we need to wait 5 minutes to add you back! So it's now near 8:15 and she waits, others are being seen... After 5 minutes the receptionist does the type clicky, clicky again and almost as she does the last click my wife hears from behind her "Tammy" - she goes and hands the changes in, all in order... initial, initial, stamp, stamp, stamp 45 minutes later we have gotten the 3 minutes effort required.
Speaking of changes though... our building inspector once failed us because the plans did not have a call-out for the hurricane clips used on a wall that was not shown! The carpenter had noticed that the architect had missed an interior wall that was basically needed to extend the stucco up to the vault line of the roof. It was non structural and simply not called out - but it was needed cosmetically. The carpenter was quite proud to tell us that even though it was not needed, he knew the inspector would want to see hurricane clips on this tiny bit of partition wall so he had put it all in and we'd be good. Little did he realize that we had the "by the book" inspector - the plans were OK without the wall... but now that the wall was built she needed to see an architect's seal on the revision, after all, the wall included hurricane clips and must be properly engineered!
Still, the inspector's side of this is silly too. One guy got a call during an inspection and explained that he gets the same call every month - someone, somewhere is verifying that he is still using that state issued phone. He said not only do they call him about the phone, each month someone else calls to ask for the VIN on his truck and someone else for the s/n on his computer. He thought it was funny that not only are they paying people to make all these calls, but undoubtedly they are writing it all down somewhere and making a file on it.
What are your stories? I've got dozen's more.