we are
twenty five
THE MORE THINGS CHANGE, THE MORE THEY STAY THE SAME by Alison Mirams CEO, Roberts Co & 2018 Laing O’Rourke Business Woman of the Year Award Winner (NSW)
On my first day working on a construction site I rang my now husband at lunchtime and said I’ve made a mistake. I’d been sent to a project in Chatswood, the site office was in a retail shop and at lunchtime the smell of hot chips drifted through the site office. I had a tiny desk and my boss told me I didn’t need a computer. Day two wasn’t an improvement. I was sent to head office for training where I was told we will never say thank you so just suck it up. It was a massive culture shock. A few weeks in I was told by a site foreman “you won’t last.” But I did - for 16 years. It was a hard environment but there was something very addictive about it. In my first subcontractor meeting, the team spoke about window mullions and despite having a building degree, I had no idea what they were talking about. That night I looked up the definition of mullions in the paper dictionary, I couldn’t just google it in the meeting as Google wasn’t invented. We had a fax machine and each day’s correspondence was photocopied (as fax paper faded) and placed in a ‘red folder’ and it was circulated to the managers each day. Once read, you’d sign your name on the 30
front and pass it on. Imagine the joy when email was rolled out and the red file and formal posted letters were disbanded. The site office was a sea of paper. Every project had an A1 plan printer. Supervisors carried plans in their back pockets. We had racks of A1 plans hanging next to the plan bench where all important decisions were made. There was no BIM or 3D design. Floppy disks were 5.25” and held a massive 360KB of data! We operated on MS DOS - I’m talking pre-Microsoft Windows. Each day the foremen would head out onsite at 7am. They’d only come back in for food and rest. Lunch was at the team table, but the conversation was not very ‘becoming.’ That was the 1990s. The foremen would carry a black book where they wrote everything down. The daily head count was completed walking the floor and counting men (and they were men). If the men moved floors during the count, they got counted twice. To say it was unsophisticated is an understatement. The supervisors and engineers would come back to the office at 4pm en masse to do their paperwork and have beers. Practical jokes were common. If you had an office, THE NAWIC JOURNAL
