not knowing Autocad...

I spent most of today in a training session whose purpose was to teach us how BART (the subway system here) wants their autocad drawings done. The people who made the autocad files apparently didn't really follow any standards so the files are all in a mess. And BART is really particular about how they want them done. Three people from my group attended, including myself. The other two had worked on these drawings and spent the whole time either laughing or wincing at their own mistakes.

There were 4 people from the civil and highway group. 3 of them were interns but one of them is part-time. The other person from their group had ran into similar problems with Caltrain. He said that they submitted the drawings and the guy from Caltrains looked at 2 drawings and sent the whole thing back to them. It had taken them 3 weeks with 3 or 4 people working full time, around the clock (almost literally because there were people in New Jersey working on this too), to fix everything. We were like, dude... don't tell us stuff like this. Anyway, there were 2 people from the Oakland office who are experts in CAD and taught us how to fix these mistakes.

I actually have never used autocad for anything useful. This actually turned out to be good news. Because if I had taken a class or have had significant experience with CAD like the other 3 interns, they would definitely make me work on this. But since I don't, my supervisor would rather I work on something else and only let me help them if they really can't find anything else. At one point, one of the other interns was like, "This is a lot harder than just drawing lines on the screen." The other guy in my group pats me on the arm was like, "haha, this is what you're doing, putting lines on screens." And I'm thinking, "crap, I don't even know how to put lines on the screen."

Again, this turned out to be a good thing since there's plenty of other things I can work on including a new project that's more hydrology and hydraulics than anything else. I think we're designing drainage for a road. I'm pretty excited about that actually. The person who was assigned this project said she's never done anything like this and the last hydraulics class she took was a while back. And here I am having worked for a water/wastewater company and taken 2 fluids classes.

Back when I had thought that there would be 4 or 5 of us all working together to fix these CADD files, I recommended that we take over the conference room and move our computers in so we can all be together. Then we can go through the steps together, ask each other questions, and not make dumb mistakes that would take more time to fix later on. They took me seriously. One of the guys was like, "we can ask the IT guy and he'll move a server in." I wouldn't mind working together with the other interns like that. They seem to be pretty cool people and I want to get to know them better. The other 2 full time interns are from San Jose State.

It's funny that they're the ones who are doing most of the work on this though. Especially considering a lot of the drawings are from my group. My supervisor spent the first 2 days back from work yelling on the phone at various people about how his group's budget got cut from 3,000 to 2,000 hours. And some other group has 9,000 hours that he claims they can't possibly use. He was really worried about fixing these drawings. "They're going to spend 2 hours, fix one title block and that's it!!" So I guess the other group gave him their interns to work on this. He was probably sad that I didn't know how to use Autocad at this point. Even if I did, I don't think he would entrust this whole fixing cad files to just one person anyhow. And I'm the only intern in his group. It's pretty critical stuff. They need to get this right since it's the 100% submittal.

Anyhow, this week at work has been pretty cool. It started out pretty slow though. I've gotten to know my coworkers a little better. It seems like a stressful place to work though. But I guess all private consulting place is like that. Everyone has to have billable hours. You're working on several projects at once and trying to stay on budget. I think EBMUD has much better benefits, less stressful, even a nicer office. But it's true that I wouldn't get as much experience. They work on so many different projects. And you can always help out on another project, as long as they can give you the hours for it, of course. It's something that I haven't quite gotten used to yet, asking for hours. I mean, I guess it's necessary but it just makes everything seem so up-tight. Anyhow, counting the weeks here... only 7 more left.