you know I was in California and Michigan but recently I moved to Middle East... for my business
I spent 6 years in the Middle East and as far as CCTV goes I saw some sights I'll never be able to un-see. I do however have a massive folder of photos titled "how not to do shit" which includes a gentleman making a precision bracket for an aerobridge using some strip-steel, a hammer and a brick, and a great video of it taking 16 "site-engineers" to bend one 20mm galv conduit (again, at the airport oddly enough).
If I were to offer you any advice related to projects, I'd say this :
Regardless of the stage of project, start at the beginning. If you are designing the CCTV system, go back to the risk assessment. If you are a contractor, go back to the design documents. Take a 10,000ft view of the building and see what the designer was trying to achieve.
Actually, I'm going to assume from here on that you are the contractor, because if you are the designer and asking these questions then the client needs a refund.
When examining a complex system, start at first principles. If you get lost go back to the start , and keep doing this until you get it. Ask questions. If you need to find someone who actually knows the answer, look until you do.
One thing that was endemic in the Middle East was that everyone was an expert. Nobody would ever admit they didn't know the answer and they'd bullshit you until you went away. It's a face-saving cultural thing and annoying as hell. I've actually seen a guy stand there and tell his boss the building was going well as a wall literally fell down behind him. It's why Duabi Airport T2/C3 took 6 years to build instead of the original 3. Nobody would admit there was a problem and therefore you couldn't fix it.
I wish you the best of luck, but to be honest by the sounds of things you're a bit out of your depth. No worries, plenty of people have been thrown in at the deep end and learned to swim. They just didn't do it by asking oddly phrased questions on a random web forum. They did it by asking knowledgeable people to explain stuff to them, but you can only get a good answer to a good question, and your questions thus far have been a bit mushy (and I'm being polite).
Learn to ask a good, specific question and you'll get 10 answers. 8 will be "shoot from the hip by armchair experts", but 2 of them will be accurate answers by people who've been there and done that.
I don't miss the middle east, but I do miss the magnitude of the projects.
