He told me the readings were within tolerance and thanked me for my time. They weren't within tolerance. No, he said they weren't. She waited. Leona, he said, "You don't owe me anything." She said, "I know that.
I'm not calling because I expect you to help. I'm calling because you're the only person who looked at that system before the signoffs were falsified. And if there's documentation from that visit, photographs, readings, anything, it establishes a baseline that proves the discrepancies aren't wear and tear. It proves they were there before the inspections were logged. I have all of it, he said.
I always document site visits. I know, she said. Another silence. How long before you have to make a decision about the opening? He said 72 hours.
She said if I pull the opening without documentation, I take the full liability exposure and Victor's version of events fills the vacuum. If I have the technical baseline, I can go to the board with a complete picture before he does. And if you do nothing, then 300 guests walk into a building with wiring that hasn't been properly reviewed. And when something eventually goes wrong, which it will, it goes wrong on Oralene's watch. He did not respond immediately.
She heard him set something down. The radio volume dropped. I'll bring the documentation tomorrow morning, he said. Send me the address of wherever you need me. He came to Oralene's offices at 8:00 in the morning with a portable hard drive and a printed binder organized by date and site location.
He wore his workc clothes. He shook hands with Leona's head of project development and her legal counsel and sat down at the conference table and walked them through his documentation the same way he would have walked a client through a service report clearly sequentially without interpretation beyond what the data required. The photographs from his March site visit showed the secondary circuit configurations as they had existed before the falsified inspections. The readings he had recorded matched nothing in the contractor's final signoff documents. The written concern he had filed was timestamped, digitally signed, and logged in his own system with the delivery confirmation from the general contractor's server.
It was Leona's legal counsel said afterward almost exactly what they needed. He spent 4 hours in that conference room. He answered every question. He did not perform concern or urgency. He simply provided what he had and explained what it meant in plain terms and let the lawyers and engineers do their work.