Saturday, December 16, 2017

Cloud City



Bonjour!

I was just reading over comments - and enjoying memories of doing the Revit sync two-step.

There was always that one asshole who would work all afternoon and neglect to save to central before leaving for the day.  I would come in bright and early the next morning to see if I could convince Revit to behave like a functional piece of software - only to have them drag in at Architect:30, sync, and find out that everything I had managed to do just got blown away (well, the next time I synced anyway - since you didn't actually get any indication when someone else did it).

I jokingly mentioned one time that the only advantage to Revit being such a slow, unproductive piece of shit was that when it would crash or otherwise eat itself, you wouldn't really lose a whole lot of work. Obviously you might've burned a lot of daylight, but chances were you didn't really get anywhere.

Of course, I was always looking for any reason to say 'fuck it',  export what I was working on to ACAD,  and finish up in a fraction of the time and stress. I would even have time to open the model one last time and make sure the lights were located properly (which was the only thing anyone else honestly seemed to care about).

Half the time they didn't actually know that I wasn't working in Revit to complete my drawings - except that my titleblock would have the correct project information (address, job name, etc.) instead of the bullshit that someone slapped in as a placeholder when they set the model up.

I would have my sheets set up so they showed up on the list on their coversheet (once I even imported my drawings from ACAD onto drafting views in Revit so the drawings themselves appeared on the sheets).

It wasn't too difficult to tell I wasn't actually using Revit though, and someone would occasionally get butthurt that I didn't have my dick in the Revit pencil sharpener. They would complain to my boss (who didn't really care, but who also got tired of listening to people complain).

They finally wore him (and by extension me) down into doing a handful of projects in Revit - every single one of which was a massive waste of time and effort for zero gain.

One of the big selling points of converting our office over to BIM/Revit was the ability to charge more for our services - but in reality most projects that had BIM as a deliverable had zero additional fee (or time), and after a certain point the 'all Revit all the time' cabal decided that even if BIM  wasn't requested (or paid for) that those projects would be done in Revit anyway.

Some of them had it in their head that the additional experience in Revit made it a good idea - while others were actually operating under the delusion that they could complete projects faster/better with Revit (despite copious amounts of evidence to the contrary).

The most hilarious part was watching them generate models for tenant finish-outs that we had already received CAD layouts for (and which just needed to be reviewed for local codes and slapped on our titleblock).

One of these came through with a 1 month deadline - but within a the next day or so, the deadline was abruptly cut in half. Everybody else flew into a panic. I smiled because having the CAD layout meant that I didn't have to wait for anyone to generate a model to get to work (most Revit projects would only end up getting kicked off to everyone else after Architectural had spent most of the fee and moved the project deadline closer in order to get a 25% max. completed model for everyone else to work in).

Once they did complete their unnecessary Reviting all I had to do was export their plan (and then point out the mistakes they made). Even funnier was that we did three projects for the same client, but each one had to fit into a differently sized strip-mall shell.

I was able to copy what I did on the first project to the other two and adjust as necessary (then go work on my next dozen or so projects), while the Reviteers had to design three separate models. Even if they had copied the first model over to create the next one, I  can't imagine what would've happened to my stuff when they started adjusting it.

I can, however, imagine the words I  would have used to describe my displeasure with the process (and at least 90% of them would have been the word 'fuck').

As in: 'Fuck Revit', 'Fuck Autodesk', 'Fuck Revitards, and' Fuck You For Fucking with my Fucking job you Fucking Fuckheaded Fucks'.

Au Revoir,
Mssr. SkullFuck

Next Time:Wall To Wall