Monday, May 4, 2020

Letters From The Apocalypse

WTF is up you stupid bunch of cocksuckers?

I've slacked off writing anything on this blog for a while now because my only exposure to the idiotic clusterfuck of retardation that is Revit is when I receive yet another shitty looking set of floor plans that take a day and half to clean up and/or make any sense out of.

I've been fortunate to be able to work from home during this whole goddamned pandemic - even though I pretty much just go into my office and am more or less left alone the vast majority of the time (most of the people I work with just kept going in since we are considered an 'essential business').

I'm not really that concerned about catching Coronavirus, but I live in a state filled with idiots who buy into conspiracy theory bullshit and suck a lot of Donald Trump cock (which, regardless of how this whole thing started, the response at all levels has been the equivalent of watching retards attempt to have sex).


I didn't bother asking if I could do it, I just packed up my shit one day, dumped all the stuff I was working on into my dropbox, and loaded a student copy of ACAD onto my laptop (2017, because it was the oldest one available - and they haven't added a single bit of functionality that I need or want in the last decade).

I had my QAT set up pretty quickly and tweaked it as I went, and was off to the races - it's funny, I'm pretty sure 2017 was the version of CAD I was stuck with before I left the Revit job, and the only real concern I had with it was that they had made the dashed line that extends from the origin of an object you are moving orange for some stupid reason with no way to change the color.

Minor quibble, I know, but that's the kind of thing that gets slipped in there and ignored by the majority of people, and once they start operating under the 'you'll get whatever we give you' mentality, it goes sideways pretty quickly.  Anyway, I'll ignore it for now and be back to working on good old ACAD 2014 (that doesn't even have to access a license) when I get back to the office.

I'm always glad not to be working in Revit, but this particular fuckaround would've been next to impossible with the size of the files, the size (and requirements) of the program itselt, etc. - and while my laptop is a beast, it can be a beast while not trying to run a shitty piece of resource hogging software.

Anyway, the latest project that I received is an office building tenant finish out - actually two tenant finish outs in a building that we designed the shell for.  One tenant is taking up half of the third floor, while the other tenant is taking up half of the first floor, the entire second floor, and the other half of the third floor.

In between when we designed the shell building and now, someone realized that the building was going to be built inside the fence of a government facility (an arsenal specifically) and that it would need to meet all of the requirements that the rest of the buildings at that facility were built to.

Fortunately they hadn't actually started installing any of my systems yet, so I was able to take the old drawings, tweak them a bit, then start work on the finish-outs.  Unfortunately the finish out plans were done in Revit, by two different sets of firms, and besides not being designed to the same specifications (which I'm SURE someone is going to notice - and probably result in me getting fucked).

Both sets of firms did the standard botch-job in Revit - but one went the extra mile, with walls that they couldn't figure out how to connect, so there were hatched regions hiding their fuckups all throughout the drawings.  Both also had shit sticking through walls, random crap showing up at the wrong level, and just... fucks sake people.

If I weren't concerned about how shitty my drawings looked, I could just ignore it and slap my stuff on top of it, but that's just not how I roll.  I've had people comment on how much easier my drawings are to read - and they will often use them when marking up other system because you can actually tell where the fuck doors, openings, windows, etc. are - because they don't look like they were scribbled by a mentally deficient third grader.

I got the plans cleaned up, put my devices on them, and wired them up - only to get pulled off of that job to fix YET ANOTHER screw-up by some installers that had given us a huge stack of hard-copy markups to integrate into a building (the building consists of a two story main level, and then two 14 story towers - which we were designing a smoke removal system for, but which the installers didn't bother to wire the way we showed).

The first set of markups had HUGE amounts of mistakes, including outdated information - which I wasted my time putting on my drawings, only to have to go back and erase most of it and start from scratch.  The final result was nothing short of FUCKING IMMACULATE, but it didn't have to take that much time and effort to get it there.

In fact, the whole reason I was up against the wall on the office building was that I had wasted time with the first set of markups thinking I would get it out of my way (plus the owner of my firm had kind of requested that I make it a priority).  Instead, it got me behind on both projects - and falling further behind as I tried to interpret the scribbled BULLSHIT from where someone had attempted to document what was installed.

Fortunately, I'm a fucking badass, and I have a FUNCTIONING SET OF SOFTWARE that doesn't require me to suck its dick and swallow whatever nasty diseased shit that spews out of it, so by the end of the day yesterday I had the tower project 100% and then jumped back in and finished running calculations on the office building (I had sent on a copy of the floor plans when I got them done, as well as a riser diagram that I finished the next day - and of course the first comment was 'herp derp - where are the calculations?!?!'

Not - 'thanks for busting your ass to get this project that we dropped on you on a Friday after telling our client it would be done the day before we even gave it to you' or 'we appreciate you not immediately driving to our office and punching us in the face when we promised that we would have it three days from now since we weren't able to get before we actually gave it to you'.

I decided I didn't want to have to think about it all weekend, so I busted my ass and finished the calculations and sent them on.  There are still a few holes in them, and there are still some details for other systems that are lacking (and I'll need to give the calculations some tweaks to make the  proprietary software that the company we purchase equipment from shat out to make it spit out an accurate bill of material).

I'm putting it on the back burner though, and jumping on another project documenting the changes to a building deep inside a local government facility - they were able to provide CAD files that were spit out from Microstation (worlds better than Revit) and some marked up .pdfs - so it shouldn't be terribly hard (other than interpreting their attempt at documenting what they built).

Fun and excitement!

-Skvllfvck

Next Time: 2021 Revit - if there is a 2021....


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