The Merry Month : The joys of importing
Robert Merry, an independent Stone Consultant and Project Manager who ran his own company for 17 years and now also runs training courses on project management, gives his personal slant on the stone industry.
Happy New Year. May all your jobs be enormously profitable, your tax bills infinitesimally small and your order books bulging like a well stuffed Christmas turkey!
Because of the publication deadline this article has to be written before any mince pies are consumed or turkeys stuffed. In fact, most turkeys are still alive and roaming the farmyard as I write.
So I begin, turkey like, in blissful ignorance of the new year.
I missed the Stone Federation AGM and the Stone Awards at the end of November due to work. Not that I was up for any Awards and I hadn’t received an invitation from the Stone Federation to appear as a panellist in their quiz game, either. Perhaps my failure to answer any of the previous year’s questions, particularly the one about petrography test results for Portland stone in 1908, had alerted them to my lack of knowledge. Must try harder.
The reason for my absence from the annual meeting was a trip to Verona to view Turkish stone for shipment to the UK to be processed and sent to fit-out a 65m long boat in Holland for a Norwegian owner and a German yacht interiors company. An environmental ‘car crash’ if ever there was one.
I travelled the day before the stone inspection, staying the night in the airport hotel and scratching around until noon the next day, when I met the German contractor off a plane from Frankfurt, accompanied by the Dutch boat builder’s project manager.
A particularly serious project manager he was too. The work was late, because the owner had changed his mind about the stone and (of course!) that was all our fault. Plus the Italian supplier had delayed the project by a further 10 days because of a process problem. Don’t ask!
“The ship sails at the end of February and all those still on-board stay on- board.”
I don’t really understand this threat. I have heard it before… many times. Why would the owner want to find a team of stone fixers still working in his bathroom on his maiden voyage?
The Italian supplier’s MD couldn’t make the meeting, so he sent his East European sales person to drive us to the yard. I sat among this international brigade feeling a little ignorant with my singular language skill. The others all spoke at least two languages and we chortled on in English.
I was desperately trying to think of subjects to fill awkward gaps in chortling. I steered clear of any references to stone, being late, or the reliability of industrial machinery.
In fact, the stone wasn’t quite ready when we arrived and what was ready needed additional processing. I think the German and the Dutchman were so pleased to see the stone they didn’t really mind that collection was delayed.
We dashed to the airport for me to catch the 4.20pm flight back amidst frantic phone calls to arrange the transport of the stone. This was a Thursday and as many of you will know, stone from Northern Italy needs to be loaded by Friday to reach the UK by Tuesday-ish.
“Yes, yes. The stone will be ready tomorrow and we will arrange everything. Don’t worry,” my host assured me.
The stone didn’t leave until Monday. The lorry was trapped outside Milan in a snow drift. It arrived in England the following Friday. Project management in the stone industry? Pah!
Now I’m on a train travelling through Holland to meet the fitter to start the work. There is snow outside and it looks like more is on its way. Hopefully I will make it back home tonight and be able to post this article in time for publication.
The Verona meeting took three hours, six plane trips, a car ride, a night in a hotel and lots of hanging around. Plus the stone had more stamps on its passport than Michael Palin.
It is the nature of our business that we travel, that the stone travels further and I guess a boat contract in Holland is unusual as a final destination.
But the environmental impact of this small bundle of stone worries me. Of course we want the work. But if we are truly concerned about the environmental impact of stone, we might need some radical re-thinking of the way we do business.
Until next month: auf wiedersehen, gegroet, arrivederci.