The most expensive thing on a deployment isn't the equipment.
It's the second trip.
Last month on the Winnipeg deployment, we had three sites lined up in a single day — crews scheduled, client briefed, vehicle loaded. During a final review of the day's paperwork, the site access notes didn't line up with the permit window we actually had.
One ten-minute phone call later, it was confirmed: the access time in the paperwork was wrong. Without that call, we'd have driven out with a full crew and arrived at a locked gate.
Nobody applauded. Nobody put it in the status report. And that's the whole point — the coordinator's best work is invisible. In CAPM terms, that's risk management: identify, assess, respond. In field terms, it's reading the paperwork like it matters, because it does.
I've started keeping a private log of near-misses — every "we almost" that a verification step caught. It's the most honest measure of a coordinator's value I've found.
What near-miss did you catch this week that nobody will ever know about?
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