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Frosty, I've met more than a few people who loved to say "slow and steady wins the race" in response to a blown deadline. The tortoise's "secret" is that he says on track. When you're slow, there's no "give" in the order of operations. While reading your examples, one of the things that stands out to me is how people will put incredible amounts of physical work into something that's intellectually lazy. A lot of times it's clearly much more work to painstakingly monitor several "indicators" of hard work, than it is to measure progress on the work. For example, checking that all the windows are clean, and that nobody's standing at the water-cooler for too long could take all day without generating any beneficial leadership to the workers. In contrast, it might take a concerted effort to think through all the necessary criteria to define "success". However, once it's been defined, both workers and management have a clear set of standards to uphold. I think many manager's shy away from this because clear standards leave little room for plausible deny-ability. "Floating" between bureaucratic necessity, and compassionate leadership allows them greater latitude to cultivate an image independent of their performance. Every miserable workplace I've ever had was overseen by "floaters". These people unerringly focus on whatever is "measured" by higher ups, without regard to the underlying intent. One "management" idea that doesn't get much attention is to challenge the corporate response to mistakes. There's a lot of wisdom in learning from mistakes. Very few companies will explain how mistakes were involved in development of a given policy. If companies actually want workers acting in good faith, they should recognize the firms obligation to respond in kind.

The other day I was on a construction site with some colleagues. Everyone we saw was working, however, there are critical tasks that haven't been completed. Every time I tried to steer the focus towards addressing these tasks, I heard all about how busy everyone is. The same sort of thing happens whenever I call a vendor that's perpetually late. They're always too busy to deal with me when there's time to resolve an issue. I've heard people talking about "reactionary" workplaces, I've worked in a few myself. I'm not sure that's what is really going on. The workers on that construction site were all earnestly doing their best. They genuinely thought they knew better, which is why they focused on task Y instead of the scheduled task X. They're way ahead on tasks that don't matter for today, and way behind on tasks that do. My colleagues all have tremendous sympathy for these workers, and make endless excuses on their behalf whenever they're behind schedule. In contrast, we've got an employee who's just slow. Everything he does takes longer than average. He's articulate, personable, reliable, and intelligent. Every client falls in love with him, often to the extent that they directly hire us for repeat work. He's enormously profitable to the company because he's generating his own revenue stream that's willing to pay higher prices and wait longer for his slow-poke approach. This guy drives my colleagues crazy because he never looks "busy". Everyone else is stressed out trying to make their deadlines and stay ahead of the project demands, while this guy's just "coasting" through his working life. It's my lonesome opinion that the slow poke is the most productive employee we have. He requires virtually zero overhead and he's easily earning us double the net profit of our next-best worker. This got me to thinking about productivity from a different perspective. See, we can measure the progress of work with a fair degree of accuracy. The problem as I see it, is that most people don't consider how their work fits into order of operations in the big picture. If you're not hitting big-picture milestones, you're not making production. Sometimes, all the other stuff you've completed isn't really relevant to the powers that be. I see a lot of hard-working people who get fixated on "doing a good job", so they target tasks they feel they can complete without hindrance. Any effort to call their attention to more pressing issues is an affront to their image of craftsmanship. There are some very talented people who simply don't see a deadline as a professional standard. By extension, they are upset when clients fail to appreciate the quality of their work. The slow guy I mentioned above, always makes his deadlines because his priority is defining what matters most to the client. As I write this, it occurs to me that we don't measure the effort put into managing logistics and scheduling as part of "production". The "busy" workers consider all of that to be managements problem. Once you factor for the cost of additional management plus the inevitable overtime pushes to meet deadlines with the "busy" crews, it becomes obvious why the "slow guy" is so profitable.

It's also common on electrical terminals, especially military surplus.

I made a steel tri pod stand with bolted clamps holding the anvil to it. It's actually faster and easier to tip it up on one leg, pivot, and set it down. I can "walk" the anvil in and out of my garage without struggling over the cracks and bumps in between. The two wheel cart would be more work.

Please listen to Steve. The code requires conductors and equipment to inductive loads to be sized at 125% of operating current. It's not always as simple as reading a nameplate or a chart somewhere. This is because many motors draw huge starting (inrush) currents before they reach synchronous speed. Contactors that aren't properly selected, or set up will only work for a while. I've replaced contactors that were welded in the on position, and I've replaced others that were burnt in two. Purpose-built motor starters combine the appropriate contactor with an overload relay. They are often sized by the motor's horsepower but you have to be very careful not to stumble into a 3-phase motor starter since those are much more common. Finally, I think it's really, really, important to point out that electrical equipment voltage ratings are nominal. The actual supplied voltage is always different than the system name would suggest. Devices properly rated for an installation might sport any of the following ratings; 210V, 220V, 225V, 230V, 240V, or 250V. "Intelligent" devices might have labels that read 100V~250V which means the device can accept a range of voltages. None of this stuff is made for installation by unqualified personnel so the installation instructions/schematics tend to be pretty minimalist.

I've recently come across a few articles on Artificial Intelligence research which suggests that independent price setting algorithms have "learned" to collude with one another to maximize profitability. Researchers are still working out whether this is happening in the real world. One of the most distressing comments in the article is that the researchers mentioned that these algorithms are capable of colluding without direct communication. The AI programs learn to respond to their digital competitors price in a way that maximizes the "punishment" to whoever gives the lower price. Within a few iterations, the programs "learn" that it's mutually beneficial to set the price just below monopoly level. This gives the impression of competitive market without the risk of accepting less profit. The researchers ran tests with more AI "competitors" which didn't change the results. All the AI programs learned to avoid competitive pricing. Human nature being what it is, I think it's very possible that plausible deny-ability is potent incentive. "We didn't teach it to cheat", isn't the same as "we taught it right from wrong". The article suggests this AI behavior doesn't meet the current legal definition of collusion. Even if it did, proving real-world examples of this are going on may be very difficult. Interestingly, studies done on human subjects suggests that people were unable to achieve the same level of price fixing without direct communication. I think that's an erroneous conclusion. People programmed the algorithm that taught itself to cheat. The AI is just a tool allowing people to bypass a human limitation. One of the more potent aspects of this tool may be the way it illustrates how people often separate stated intentions from measured outcomes to obscure what they're really trying to achieve.

Latticino, Most of the design-build projects I've done suffered from poor time management. There were long pauses in productivity while the client and Architect met weekly to talk over different options. All the engineering disciplines were expected to attend these meetings but nothing in their scope was allowed to progress for fear of conflicting with a future resolution. If the design schedule was ten weeks total, we'd feel lucky to get two and a half weeks to complete the electrical design. There are engineering consultants who barely look up from their computer during a meeting. I've seen some of them working on a completely different project during the meeting.

Kozzy, I have a lot of moments at work where I ask myself why some obviously necessary bit of information wasn't provided. Back when I was starting out, I used to assume it was just an oversight or an unintentional omission. As time went on, I noticed patterns in what was and wasn't revealed. One day I was discussing this problem with a client and I joking asked "why is this a secret?". That thought stuck with me because it changed my perspective of the whole situation. Really often, it's a "secret" because the missing information would reveal something inconvenient about their motivations. I've discovered quite a few nasty surprises by asking myself; "What if they're hiding something?".

CMS3900 The ISO comment reminds me of "best practices". In theory, everyone knows that "best practices" should be followed. In practice, everyone games the standards in proportion to their status in the hierarchy. For example, quality control is mostly citing "design intent" whenever production-level work descends to design-level quality.

Yesterday I had three completely different jobs all suffer from the same basic problem. The designers weren't updating their design to include changes from people outside their office. One job had all the HVAC equipment located in the middle of every partition wall in the project. If the Mechanical engineer had bothered to consult the floor as well as the ceiling plans, they might have avoided this rather obvious problem. Another job came in over budget so we came up with a cheaper lighting package. The architect never updated their plans to include the new fixture specs so when the city planning and zoning department approved their exterior plans, they committed to using overpriced fixtures. Now we have to figure out if it's cheaper to resubmit for permit, or to simply buy the overpriced lights. Finally, we have a job which has a complex ceiling system with custom-made light fixtures that must fit perfectly. This system is compartmentalized so that there are seven variations of the same theme. The Architect provided a single "typical" detail giving the component dimensions in Feet, Inch, and Fractional inches. This Architect didn't give overall lengths for the assemblies with one exception. When I had to calculate the fixture lengths, I used all the component dimensions to arrive at my total. When the ceiling installer laid out the system, he used the only overall length dimension that this Architect provided. There's a 1/4" difference that "stacks up" due to the compartmentalization. The largest assembly generates several inches of difference which will be visible from some distance away. I've spent the last two days trying to get "professionals" to stop converting the measurements into decimal feet so they could use an excel spreadsheet to do the math. It only takes a moment to do these calculations by hand, but everyone is so afraid of appearing incompetent that they're spending hours trying to get a computer program to do the math for them. Everyone is assuming that CAD generated drawings can't have dimensional mistakes. I suspect it hasn't occurred to these folks that Architects might find it's easier to adjust the labeled dimension, than to actually change the length of a drawing. Taking that shortcut on a component dimension was easy. Calculating the overall length wasn't.

I've noticed that a lot of people never really grasp the notion that doubling the denominator in a fraction divides the quantity in half. Tripling gets you a third, and so on. Another super-quick way to get equal divisions using a straight ruler is to mark perpendicular lines at your end points. Now take a ruler that's longer than the marked end points and set it diagonally across those perpendicular lines. Tilt it until you arrive at a even or odd number which corresponds to easy division for your problem. Let's say you've got a piece of stock that's 7-5/16" long and you want to divide that length into equal thirds. Mark the 7-5/16" length with a perpendicular line at the origin and the end point. Now take the rule and lay it diagonally until the zero and the 9" mark cross the origin and the end point line respectively. Mark where the 3" and the 6" appear on the ruler. Now take those points and pull down a perpendicular line from them. The distance is perfectly divided into thirds with easy math.

There's a 13 mile stretch of interstate near me getting a lane added in each direction. It's pretty much straight as an arrow, perhaps five overpasses, and no seismic activity to worry about compared to AK. The project is anticipated to take nine years. Just for giggles, I googled the production rate of the transcontinental railway. On their most productive day, they laid ten miles of track. From what I can tell, that doesn't include time cutting and grading. It was however twelve hours of setting ties and track. All work done by either man or beast. I had a few classes on road construction so I'm not an expert by any means. That said, I've worked for firms that hired paving firms to build public and private roads. When the road designs were identical , the private roads consistently took less than a quarter of the time to get built. In my experience, most of the additional time was generated by leaving the site after the prep was completed, and not coming back until a day or two before the deadline whereupon the paving is completed in one or two hard-driving shifts. Typically they'd be gone for several months between prep and pave with all the traffic control stuff left in the public's way. There were no inspection, permit, or weather related delays to justify this behavior. This delay was built into their schedule. Every paving company was basically the same. All of their estimators/salesmen would swear up and down that it simply couldn't be done any faster.

acronin, I'm not sure you're picking up on Mike Thurston's point. He gave an example of how people undervalue things when they price them off the cuff. You might want to browse online looking at knives of similar description. My thinking is that you'll find some that compare favorably so you'll see what those makers are asking.

Glenn, As a professional estimator with ten years of experience, I can say that it's very rare for competing bids to perfectly agree on quantities, but very common for them to be virtually identical in cost. The principle difference is the round up/ round down function of judgement. People get hung up on precision because it gives them something to measure, so they feel better about it. Accuracy is hitting the right answer. Good judgement can look a lot like luck to an uninformed bystander. Really often, the influential factors aren't that difficult to roughly calculate. The hard part, is knowing which factors to look for.

ausfire, I got all the way to college before I encountered a teacher who presented a lesson showing how fractions were more precise and intuitive than decimal approximations in practical applications. Huge physics calculations could be done in your head if you kept everything in fractions. Trying to get the solution using decimal approximations just made it a lot harder. That teacher had a knack for writing exam questions that were virtually impossible to solve any other way.

Glenn is spot on about "having a number" to check against the calculator. I've met a whole lot of people who get their order of operations wrong when they're using a calculator. Same numbers, same operations, different answers. One aspect of this that jumps out at me is how people love work out a rough percentage or ratio without much consideration for the driving relationships. That leads to a lot of incorrect assumptions. For example, you could take the total cost of a construction project and divide it by the square footage to get a square foot cost. OK fine. Now, you decide you want to build something the same size or slightly smaller with a more efficient layout and the budget jumps. What happened? Well, things like restrooms are driven by occupancy not square footage. Depending on local building rules, restrooms have to be made in groups of pairs or triplets. Restrooms require just about every skilled trade to work sequentially in a limited amount of space which makes them expensive. The further these rooms are away from the utility sources, the more the price will rise. Crossing the "occupancy threshold" where you have to add a bathroom group might also require that the groups be placed at opposing sides of the space which can boost their cost. The "right" way to ballpark this is to use a parametric estimate. Bathrooms can be priced as a standalone parameter. That gives you some way to quantify the cost impact of changing the occupancy.

Buzzkill, sorry I mistook what you were getting at. You're describing a situation where you've got a lot more information to go on, than a poorly-defined conceptual pricing request from a new client. My original post obviously doesn't apply to situations where you're working with a lot of information. If you have past experience with any factor of the project, that knowledge becomes a baseline for the project scope. As you put it, this is the "real case" cost. We have some clients who get different pricing depending on which of their Project Managers will be running the job. Incompetence, and corruption, generates a lot of risk. Risk is expensive. I've struggled with situations similar to what you're describing because it's relatively easy to knock up a percentage, but it's difficult to prove that the percentage is driven by the correct factors. For example, let's say a client tends to dither on decisions. Past projects show they consumed X% more hours of management's time than the typical job. Management time isn't exclusively spent on client decisions. A large part of it is just processing paperwork, communicating, sitting in meetings, etc. Sometimes we're dealing with really poor designs that will generate lots of hard decisions for the waffling client. That's a perfect storm of intersecting professional incompetence. Working through that morass might take a different approach than just adding management hours. It might be better to price the necessary technical and administrative support to meet that challenge. In the past we've sought the services of an independent engineering consultant to counter problems generated by the clients incompetent design team. Contrary to my original expectations, it was actually cheaper to hire an engineering consultant to resolve major issues quickly, than it would have been to pay a manager to ride it out hoping the correct thing would eventually happen.

George, Your comment reminds me of a story a Journeyman Electrician told me about his grandfather. Apparently his grandfather was quite a renaissance man. He played a part in designing things as varied as a limited slip differential for a light truck, and a hydro-electric power plant for a rural community. The grandson inherited a neat prototype 100 series pickup with tandem axles from the 1950's. Anyhow, the hydro plant originally had two buildings. The larger of the two housed the power generation, the smaller housed the management. Over the course of forty years or so, there were a lot of improvements made to that site. Three more buildings went up on the site, all of them were for management. When the whole plant was going to be decommissioned in the 1990's this guy's family was invited out to tour the facility one last time. He said that all the generation equipment was original. Maybe the expansion of administrative bureaucracy is the key to understanding why maintenance is so often neglected. There's a lot of cynicism applied to corporate takeovers that lead to mass layoffs. It seems plausible to assume that "greed" motivates the buyer to discard long-term employees of the purchased firm. However, it's pretty easy to show how human nature leads managers to propagate bureaucracy. Despite all evidence to the contrary, most bureaucrats are actually human. Most of them will figure out that any painless cuts to the bureaucracy threatens their continued employment. Costs constantly rise, quality constantly declines. If the means of operational production is in constant peril, there's a lot of justification for all that management. For the most part, none of that is true, which is why middle management gets wiped out in mergers and acquisitions. The question that's been cooking my noodle for some time, is; "If human nature is the cause, how do you prevent this from happening?" The best I can come up with so far is to arrange incentives so that it's profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. I had a discussion similar to this with a fellow traveler several years ago. She thought my suggestion sounded "very expensive". I replied "You know what, you're absolutely right. How much is the national debt?"

Buzzkill, five years ago I copied a blog post onto IFI that might help with your problem. https://www.iforgeiron.com/topic/39281-why-overhead-should-not-be-figured-as-a-percentage/ The shorter version: Overhead is a time driven expense that gets paid for proportionately by the work that is ongoing when the overhead accrued. Long term projects generate more overhead than short term projects. When work is scarce, each individual job has to carry more of the overhead which really makes it hard to get prices low enough to beat a competitor. For some firms, the answer is to reduce overhead by downsizing.

Kozzy, I suspect you would agree that engineering is very different from estimating. There's no doubt that engineering decisions impact price. The purpose of my post is to help with pricing something that's very poorly defined.

"Quick, how much will you charge to make my dream come true?" Sometimes, that question isn't too far from what it's like to be an estimator. In my experience, people tend to focus on whatever they can measure to reduce uncertainty and the risk it brings. When there's less detail or "stuff" to measure, the majority of people will switch to imagining the "worst case scenario". I suppose the idea here is that you'll reduce your uncertainty by filling the gap with every imaginable fear. Sadly, a lot of people who follow this process to price their work, find themselves surprised by some unforeseen problem that they're now obliged to solve for the original bid. This inexorably leads these people to slap a hefty premium on the next "worst case scenario" they price. So to sum up, "worst case scenario" pricing efforts tends to generate high prices for the client without reducing risk for the contractor. There's a much better way to handle this, but it requires a shift in your thinking. There's a concept in design called "negative space". A good example of this is the FedEx logo. If you look carefully at the junctions of the E and the x, you'll see that it forms an arrow pointing right. That arrow is "negative space". Put another way, you're using the absence of something to better define the borders of something else. So what does that have to do with pricing unicorns? Well, consider how much negative space there is an open request for pricing. Context is huge here. Start by defining what you are. If your firm mostly makes things between X and Y, there's no reason to assume that a client approached you wanting something totally outside of your expertise. If you're not competent or capable of making the thing requested, don't price it. It's not helpful or reasonable to present your pricing as an honest answer to a legitimate contract opportunity. OK, so that just knocked the "stratospheric" options off the table. That still doesn't help to price the discrepancies between lesser and greater unicorns. Go back to the negative space. Anything that's not defined, is an opportunity to provide boundaries for understanding what is and isn't included in your price. Here again, we need to make sure that our perspective is pointed in the right direction. Listing sentence fragments like a malfunctioning robot-lawyer will not do you any favors. Time is very easy to measure and quantify. If you'd typically take 80 hours to make something similar, you can actually write that into your proposal. For example; "We included 80 hours for XYZ task based on past project experience, additional hours will be billed at $X per hour." This tells your client how much you're giving them, while also providing some insights into your reasoning. Strive for clarity, competency, and concise wording to convey the important information. Estimators spend a lot of time talking in terms of clarifications, inclusions, and exclusions. Clients, spend most of their time trying not to get suckered by a buried condition. As a general rule, I believe that exclusions should be for things that nobody reasonably expects you to have. If there's a good reason that you're not including something that people might think is your job, it's time to write a clarification explaining why you didn't include it. Any conversations to follow will be much more productive because the client can see that you are addressing their concerns. Inclusions should be items that you're 100% comfortable with. I find that it builds trust to speak plainly. For example; "Includes all stonework" versus "Includes approximately 126 square feet of stone work". A lot of fastidious estimators would choose the second statement figuring that more detail is better. Most clients won't know exactly how much stone work they'll need, they're hiring it out and just want the job done. The proposal that promises to do the obvious thing reads as more complete and trustworthy. Ok so that's all well and good, but how does this approach protect against unforeseen stuff? To answer, let's go back to that FedEx logo again. The arrow has a well-defined perimeter. Consider that perimeter for a moment. The letters of the FedEx are simplistic, consistent and orderly. Well-crafted inclusions would be written the same way. Adding a border or a banner to the letters wouldn't increase the legibility or convey the same clarity. There's a point where more detail would actually detract from the message. Now for the arrow, well-crafted clarifications illustrates the negative space which conveys your intent and/or understanding. From there, it's possible to exclude anything not expressly included or clarified in the proposal. The goal here is to avoid a list of "gotcha" exclusions without leaving your firm open to a long list of extras. Often, it helps to consider the nature of whatever it is that you're worried about. If you're concerned that the client will demand a premium material, you might provide an alternate to upgrade. When there's a huge range of prices, you could offer multiple alternates for defined ranges of material cost by meaningful (to the client) descriptor. For example "Residential grade, Commercial grade, Commercial grade". Summing up, the "worst case scenario" approach to pricing is too passive and reactive to be an effective means of controlling risk. With the focus on imagining all the things that can go wrong, little attention goes towards defining what you're actually trying to do. When the work isn't well-defined in the proposal, there is less basis to defend your firm from unexpected conditions. In contrast, it's often possible to greatly simplify the scope of work by providing clear boundaries for what is included and why. When the focus is on the boundaries of what is in the proposal, the "holes" can be explained with clarifications that build on the reasoning set forth in the inclusions. This conveys the limits of what's in your proposal better than a list of every fanciful fear you can imagine.

Frozenforge, Sometimes I wonder if your comment about body language is why there are so many "professionals" who are cavalier about missing deadlines on projects relating to these teleconferences. They can't see everyone's negative reaction.

Frosty, your last sentence made me chuckle because I remembered the part of that video where the Bonsai master had just spent a few hours discussing the intricacies of his custom order. Then this fifth generation master of making this precise thing responded that it might take him six months to a year to research how he could make it happen. Any customer who could spend hours conveying all the points they care about a pair of scissors is seriously focused on details. This customer is willing to pay whatever it costs, and they'll wait however long it takes, but they won't accept anything less than their vision of perfection. Missing that mark at all jeopardizes five generations of struggle. That's a lot of pressure. Another thing that comes to mind is that we're talking about scissors that have been masterfully simplified to a precise inflection point. where anything more or less would detract from the piece. A custom order would still have to hit that inflection point, to stay consistent with the "brand". I suspect there are people working with electron microscopes who are less focused on detail.

That's a very solid observation. I've also been in situations where a "corner office" speakerphone conversation with the door open was disrupting work in the cube farm.

Over the last ten years, I've noted a distinct trend towards teleconferences and away from face-to-face meetings. Since the nature of my projects involve "teams" it's fairly common for several people from a given firm to use a conference room speakerphone for these teleconferences. The two most common speakerphone malfunctions are clipping and echo. Clipping is where the output exceeds the system's capacity which results in momentary dropouts which sounds like a robotic effect on voices. Echo is pretty self explanatory but it's generally mitigated by adjusting speaker or microphone volume. It's been my experience that speakerphone technology hasn't adapted to suit certain vocal tics. I've witnessed several situations where this unfairly influenced how the affected speaker was treated during the calls. I suspect that these individuals are unaware of how their particular vocal tic is incompatible with speakerphones. For example, some men in loud industries have developed a stentorian voice to be heard clearly. Johnny Cash through speakerphone sounds like a diesel powered robot. Anybody using headphones to participate in that teleconference is pulling them aside to avoid hearing damage. There are a lot of younger folks who increase the cadence of their speech to convey confidence and slow it to convey uncertainty. Sometimes these same people use a sing-song inflection when listing off related items. When speakerphone echo layers the cadence and inflection changes, the result is unintelligible. I've been on teleconferences where a speaker was so unpleasant to listen to, that other people interrupted to ask them to just email their statements. Another unfortunate aspect of speakerphone in business settings is that some conference tables are just huge. A person shuffling paper next to the mic generates background noise that can obscure a speaker at the far end of the table. When that person can't be heard, everyone on the teleconference asks them to speak up. I have a theory that insecure people tend to avoid sitting close to the microphone because they're trying to avoid being the center of attention. Maybe I'm wrong, but whatever the reasons, it's been my experience that the mousy voiced person will invariably be seated the farthest from the microphone. Many vocal tics take on a different intonation when the speaker strives for volume. Stutters, lisps, and vocal fry come across very differently when the speaker is going for volume. Loud porky pig with clipping and an echo sounds like a machine-gun Yosemite Sam. Yelling with a lisp can make it really hard to tell an S from a six which is a big deal when you're reciting part numbers. Kim Kardashian shouting with speakerphone clipping comes through like a morse code of screeches and growls. My point here is that speakerphone tends to makes vocal tics and speech impediments into a major communications obstacle. Currently, there's a lot of emphasis on collaboration and teamwork in business. Huddling around the conference room speakerphone is a popular physical embodiment of this philosophy. Unfortunately, these deficiencies in technology lead to situations where the expert in the room is as unintelligible as they are irritating to listen to. It has become quite common for a co-worker without a vocal tic to act as a "translator" for the teleconference. This diminishes the expert, and creates a delayed response to every question. I've participated on many such teleconferences where the client grew so frustrated with stilted nature of these exchanges, that they canceled the teleconference in favor of email. It may not be stylish, but using a cellphone with a talkset to connect directly to a teleconference can dramatically improve how you are perceived and understood in that meeting. Many people avoid topics that could lead to conflict, so it's very unlikely that a colleague will be forthright enough to mention if you have a vocal tic playing havoc with speakerphone. Everyone pretends that there's something wrong with the speakers phone connection. I've been on weekly teleconferences where a key player is regularly dismissed by everyone else because "their phone is acting up again". She's perfectly understandable whenever she works from home, but not when she's sharing a conference table speakerphone with co-workers. Nobody's willing to risk offending her by pointing out that she's the only one on that speakerphone that's impossible to understand because she has all of the above vocal tics.