Scaffcalc

Nashville to Houston, 800 km, with two headquarters at the other end: Bechtel Group, for a BEO walkthrough with Adam and Phil, and ExxonMobil, where we now have a proof of concept underway.

Viktor marked the occasion by eating a pizza on a back street in New Orleans, a city famous for gumbo, po'boys and beignets.

"I have no defence and I am not looking for one."

The food poisoning arrived somewhere past Baton Rouge. For the next eight hours he was not a passenger, he was cargo. The kind you would be fined for transporting. Both visits went well.

He attributes this entirely to the people who were vertical.

Some projects just make you stop and look. This is one of them. Richard at HJ's built something really neat and planned it in Scaffcalc. The craft is all his. We are happy to just show it off.

SAIA is a North American show. In Nashville I talked scaffolding with Taiwan, Australia and upstate New York, twice inside the same hour.

Everyone here has a photo of a scaffold on their phone. Nobody once showed me a picture of their family. Several hundred pictures of other people's bracing, held up the way a fisherman holds up a catch, except the catch weighs forty tonnes and is still standing.

Came home with a stack of business cards thick enough to need its own load calculation. I ran it. It holds.

We like merch more than is reasonable, and Nashville was the first time we fully committed. Embroidered denim, Nashville lettering, mascot in a cowboy hat and boots.

Embroidery thread is sold by the gram now, somewhere between saffron and printer ink. Our tailor weighed it out like a pharmacist. $397 a jacket, about the same as a one-way ticket to Nashville. The jackets and the people cost roughly the same to get there. Only one group complained about legroom.

We still do not have our own booth. Last week at SAIA we were in AT-PAC's, second time this year after World of Concrete in Las Vegas. Before that, STEPUP's in Fort Worth.

If there is a strategy in that, it is: be worth inviting.

In Sweden two colleagues can share a bus stop for fifteen minutes and privately apologise for the one accidental eye contact. Here a stranger interrupts you mid-sentence, listens to the whole answer, then shows you a job on his phone. That happened all week.

Another project planned in Scaffcalc by Daniel Hendersson. Everything lines up exactly where it should. The kind of clean, careful work that makes the job easier for everyone who comes after him. Well done, Daniel.