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Volume 6 - Number 40 | October 13, 2008
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EDITOR'S NOTES
If you look through any newspaper’s Help Wanted section, one word appears more often than any other — experience. Whether the listing reads “no experience necessary” or “experienced applicants only,” job know-how plays an important role in the working world. And, unlike other more tangible commodities, experience cannot be transferred. So, when a bidder on an Army project cited its parent company’s past performance to fulfill the experience requirement, the Army disqualified the bid. The Comptroller General determined that the experience could only be referenced if the larger company would directly participate in the day-to-day project operations.
It isn’t enough to have experience, though. Job performance counts, too. A project owner, dissatisfied with his contractor’s performance, kicked the contractor off the job and withheld the final payment. The contractor filed a mechanic’s lien against the owner, who argued that the remediation project was not protected by the mechanic’s lien statute. A state court ruled otherwise.
Contractual inexperience is often the downfall of homeowners who frequently enter into contracts they do not fully understand. Such was the case for a homeowner who disputed payments its lender made to the contracted builder, whom the homeowner alleged had deviated from contract specifications.
And finally, lest we permanently dismiss those who lack experience, as baseball player Doug “Red Rooster” Rader wisely said, “If experience was so important, we'd never have had anyone walk on the moon.”
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