What has got to be one of those nightmarish problems every pavement marking contractor fears happened again last week in North Carolina. A striping contractor, focused on laying out the letters identifying the nearby building as a school, placed them in the wrong order on the pavement: shcool.
Local press jumped all over the accident as a spelling mistake (which the contractor involved quickly corrected). But was it a spelling mistake? Did someone on the crew -- or everyone on the crew -- really think school is spelled shcool?
Of course not. This is not a spelling issue, it's a quality control issue. It's a mistake borne, probably, out of a crew trying to get the job done a little too quickly. And it's a case of not pausing long enough to step back, take a breath, and take a good look at the overall job before going ahead. It's an issue where the crew certainly saw the individual trees but didn't put them all together to see the forest.
Seeing the Forest for the Trees
August 12, 2010
