Thursday, October 4, 2018

Grab Some Motherfucking Popcorn

Oh Glory Be...

There is an engineering firm that shares the same office building as my company, and one of their engineers dropped by today to ask if anyone from our office would like to sit in on a Revit training seminar they are having tomorrow.

When I got done laughing, I found out that apparently they are taking on their very first Revit job ever, and HOLY JESUS are they about to get buttfucked into another dimension.

I talked with the engineer for a few minutes (I admitted that I'm not the most objective person when it comes to Revit), and it was pretty apparent that neither he, nor anyone who works for him, have any idea how royally screwed they are.

He said that he had been told to 'forget everything you know about cad', which is the understatement of the year.  'Forget everything you know - period' would be more accurate - and 'Just fucking forget it' would be spot on.

I mentioned the large files that he would be dealing with - and he told me that it's all 'cloud based' (at which point I started laughing so hard I had to use a wall to keep from falling down (accidentally switching off some lights).

I told him I hoped he had plans to upgrade his computers (which I know for a fact haven't been upgraded in quite some time - and are nowhere near capable of handling Revit).  I didn't mention the decrepit state of his network server - or the fact that his Internet connection is about to get reamed out.

I let him know about how Autodesk bought Revit from 'Charles River Software' rather than develop it from scratch (or simply give ACAD BIM abilities without breaking it's basic functionality), and how they did an end run around our collective industries to get it included as a deliverable by clients.

I just hope he's getting a REALLY good fee - because he's going to be shelling out for Revit licenses, new computers and other equipment, and then trying to figure out how to get his staff up to speed.  I offered to come by and make fun of them as they take their first baby steps on broken glass.

The only advantage I can give them is to really push for what the final deliverables need to include.  This is often left completely undefined - even by long-time Revit using firms.  This is primarily due to so few non-Revit people knowing (or caring) what the hell 'Doing It In Revit' really entails.

The fact is 'Doing It In Revit' could mean anything from 'Fully 3-D modeled self-calculating systems that are coordinated and integrated with all other disciplines' to 'Poorly slapping in a few families and finishing it up with 2D linework' (or anywhere in-between).

In my experience, almost nobody had the time to worry about what other people were doing with it because they were rushing to squeeze something even remotely passable out before (i.e. way after) the due date.

We were lucky that most of our clients did not request our Revit models, or ever actually look at them past maybe a little 'ooh' and 'ahh' walkthrough - a lot of which was faked (and had little to nothing to do with the actual building plans).

My fear (and what this engineer's fear needs to be) was always someone getting hold of the process, defining exact expectations, and then holding everyone involved's feet to the fire until they had met these expectations.

We've got at least one government client that we do work for that is psychotic when it comes to details - I mentioned them a while back when talking about how one of our equipment providers didn't have complete (or accurate) dimensions on some of their enclosures.

99.9% of the time, and probably the reason nobody ever noticed (or cared) about the oversights, these enclosures would simply show up on a job site and be installed.  The only dimension anyone cared about was the distance between the first two holes you had to drill to hand the enclosure on the wall - then everything else was gravy.

These people came back several times on the project where I took accurate measurements and provided a complete diagram of the enclosures, and kept asking for more and more detail on the diagrams showing the equipment in the panels.

Just yesterday I was going through and adding in factory provided (and in some cases installed) ribbon cables, molded plugs, etc. that they would NEVER have any reason to think about after the equipment was installed (that also junked up the diagrams).

I can't imagine if this client got ahold of Revit (if they haven't already) and started requiring different disciplines to provide their Revit models so they could be thoroughly scrubbed for any 'BIM Washing' or other (perceived) deficiencies.

Ironically, both the firm getting ready to accept the Revit dick into their eye sockets - and the psychotic client I'm describing are the same ones that required me to step in at the end of one of their massive projects and declusterfuck it - well, this time they won't have that luxury, because there's no way I'm fucking with their broke-ass Revit shit.

If they want to export it to CAD, I might consider taking a look - but when (not if) they get that far behind the eight-ball, it's going to be mega-crunch time, and I will absolutely school them on just how fucked they allowed their project to get.

The only saving grace is that my firm still has no plans to waste time with Revit - and as I've said before, the day they make the mistake of trying to convert is the day I update my Resume and GTFO.  I'm already considering a change in career (ironically one that involves 3D - but is as far removed from Revit as the East is from the West).

Anyway - Fuck Revit, yadda yadda yadda - and these poor fucks don't know what they are in for (maybe one will run across my blog when they get really frustrated and start typing combinations of 'Revit' and various curse words into Google... lol)

Sincerely,
The Laughing SkullFuck.

Next Time:Drowning In Stupidity

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