Concrete Work for Dummies (eHow Week)

Concrete slab footing

Some of the so-called information and advice out there on the internet is so downright stupid that you wonder just where it all comes from. Well, one of the chief sources of bad advice and information on the web is eHow.com, mainly because of greedy freelance writers pretending to know their hind ends from holes in the ground. Today we'll have a look at one Larry Simmons, a computer geek who – shudder! – published several hundred articles for the site. We have no idea whether his computer articles were well-informed, but we can tell that when he dabbled in other areas he quickly displayed his lack of expertise. Take, for example, "How to Measure Yards of Concrete,"¹ moved to GardenGuides.com (for some unknown reason).

Now Larry apparently did enough research to know that a "yard" is one cubic yard or 27 cubic feet. He got off track a little with the assumption that the person posing the question wanted to know how many yards of concrete there were in an existing slab. Dumbass assumption there, since 99.999... times out of a hundred people want to know how many yards they'll have to pour to make a slab, but, OK. Where he went wonky was by telling us,

"Use a measuring tape to measure the length and width of the concrete slab in feet. Round to the nearest foot. Dig alongside the slab until you reach the bottom and measure the height of the slab in inches, rounding to the nearest inch. Record your measurements. If you need to replace only part of the slab, measure only the length, width, and height of the section."

OK, Simmons, in the first place when you're estimating for construction projects, you don't round to the nearest anything, you always round up: it's far better to overestimate than to underbuy. But far more important, if you "dig alongside the slab until you reach the bottom," you don't expose the thickness of the slab; you expose the bottom of the footing (see image). If the reader used that measurement as the thickness of the entire slab, he would overestimate the yardage by... by a boatload. Dumbass. More contributions to the stupidification of the internet, and yet another Dumbass of the Day courtesy of the good folks at eHow. Thanks a bunch, Larry!

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   http://www.ehow.com/how_7655263_measure-yards-concrete.html

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