Taking the Bad with the Good!

It's been one of those days. Do you want the good news first or the bad news?

The good news is that I'm making some serious strides in Auto Sketch, my CAD program at work. My manager has just about given me the default position for design. I spent most of the day today working on a project which he wants to get permitted as soon as possible. I've got it almost done, but there are a few minor corrections to make. I always print out a copy to look over, since I notice mistakes on paper a lot quicker than I do on the monitor.

Also, while I was working, a man walked in with a request for a quote to remodel his daughter's house. I spent half an hour talking with him, looked at his pictures, and made an appointment to walk through it tomorrow afternoon. I'll do all the design work on this one.

I love my job! Most of the time anyway.

However, there is a fly in the ointment. Cindy recently purchased a Mac for her work and displaced the old PC which had been hooked up to the Internet. It has been moved to another room. We found out we could get a wireless modem for it so that we wouldn't have to run lines and hard wire. Sad to say, but when the wireless arrived, I couldn't make it work and spent a lot of time before a technician told me that Windows 2000 won't support the modem.

It gets worse. Macs require an Ethernet port while the PC used a USB. The modem we had before wouldn't support the Mac and the PC doesn't have an Ethernet port. I can't make the wireless work, I can't hard wire it, I can't use my computer online. I have to use the new one and getting used to a Mac after fifteen years on a PC is hard work.

But wait, there's more. I printed out a copy of my Auto Sketch project, blew it up as large as I could on the copier at work, and took that to Kinko's where I had it blown up to a 22 x 33 size so that I could actually see the thing. Bad news is that mistakes started jumping right out at me. Good news is that they're all minor and easily fixed. Seriously bad news is that I noticed some discrepancies in scale between two elevations and it just won't work that way. Got to be right. I figured that I'd have to copy them to another file, rescale them until I know they're correct, and then re-insert them into the file.

However, after some studying on it, I saw that one elevation (which doesn't have a dimension listed) is too long by about three inches. The height is right, the length is wrong. That will take me a half hour to fix. Not too bad, after all. The really good news, though, is that it's not my mistake. I robbed it from a preliminary drawing that our erstwhile architect had developed for this project. His drawing is wrong, not mine.

Guess maybe things don't look so bad after all. I'm back in the saddle again.