pre-stroke- my life as a contractor

the gardenia project provided my first contracting nightmare, our initial failure to lay the pipe across the sunga rasa, a measly- deceiving crossing of just aproximately 20 metres of shallow water body .for 3 months, the subcontractor, glenpoint, gallantly tried to jacked the pipe across, at times even having someone crawled in the pipe to reach the intruding end and proceeded to manually excavate by hand the ground at the pipe's front, and then by building a coffer dam to facilitate the crossing. alas all their efforts were in vain, the only alternative left to us was to engage the british contractor, land and marine, to cross the river by hdd. this was my first introduction to hdd and i proceeded to engage them at a cost of around rm 500,000.00. hdd later in my contracting life, looms large both for good(making money) and bad ( failures to cross) the gardenia project was completed around 4 months behind schedule, but most importantly we didn't abandon the project, so the client was reasonably happy and particularly impressed by our perseverance.