When Americans sit down on the toilet and “Drop off the kids at the pool”, they rarely give thought to where that fecal matter goes. We have laws, regulations, municipalities, engineers and sanitary workers that take care of our dirty business. We rarely appreciate them.

I remember my first trip to Haiti and the surprise at seeing the swale along the side of the road operating as an open sewer trench. Seeing toddlers playing in the fluids made me more fully appreciate being an American than anything else I can recall.

So when BoingBoing did an article about the world’s largest building, the Burj Khalifa located in Dubai, hauling all their sanitary sewage away in tanker trucks, I was amazed.

These trucks not only have to pick up the sewage daily from the holding tanks, but the Dubai municipal sewage treatment plant has a truck cue that can last 24 hours to get the dump accomplished. Imagine the logistics of such a line. Do you need two drivers, one to inch the truck forward and the other to sleep?

Remember that big construction boom locations like Dubai often end like a game of musical chairs. While the music plays, everything moves along, but the end of the music brings an abrupt transition…where a chair you anticipated isn’t available. As you contemplate your projects and your career, don’t forget to factor the boom and bust nature of construction into your decisions.