Wednesday, January 5, 2022

I Know You Are Right, But I Want You To Do It Wrong Anyways.

So holy goddamned fuck ya'll.

I was actually making progress (against all odds) on the shithole piece of fucking shit project that will... not... end..., then the guy who took over the project from the one who originally sold it (and then left the company - leaving us to have to deal with it) decided to come back and throw a wrench in my design - after the fact.

I had managed to complete a relatively decent set of floor plans, and only needed to finish up some calculations and details - when he pointed out that plugging my design into a new spreadsheet resulted in most (damn near all) of the circuits being overloaded.... and I.. fucking snapped.

I punched every single door on the way back to my office while screaming 'FUCK' over and over - then chucked a chair across my office, before kicking the shit out of another chair.  While I'm sure a few people heard it, only 2-3 were actually in their offices (including the dipshit who set me off).

I wandered outside, and pondered just leaving for the day (if not permanently) but my keys were still in my office (along with my jacket, and it was fucking cold out) so I wandered back in again.  It was nearly lunch time, so I grabbed my shit and left - in no condition to be behind the wheel of a car, but I managed to get something to eat (only punching the fucking shit out of my steering wheel a few times), and came back to see what the fallout would be.

Fortunately nobody really gives a fuck how I act/talk at my office - and the guy who set me off had decided to go get lunch too, so he wasn't there.  I pulled another guy in (who also hates the guy who set me off) and we reviewed what it was that he was babbling about when he told me my circuits were overloaded.

That was when I remembered overhearing the guy talking to an engineer a few weeks prior on a project that we had completed and issued.  He was concerned about the way we did the circuit calculations, and was refusing to put his stamp on the drawings unless we did what he wanted.  What it basically came down to (without going into too much detail) is that he acknowledged that our (already conservative) calculations (related to battery sizing) were right - but he wanted to make them even more conservative.

The result would've been having to go back through the project and completely redo every single circuit in the building - BUT we were able to head it off by up-sizing the wire for the circuits (probably at our own cost).  I was given the updated spreadsheet that reflected this dumbass method of designing (basically ignoring the size of battery we are putting in... for... reasons?), but I had already been doing my layout based on our standard calculations.

 This isn't the first time this has happened - we had another (government) client who decided to start getting up in our shit, and the resulting calculations would've had us limited to putting a small handful of devices per circuit, and only being able to run very limited distances (the upshot of which would be having to add extra power supplies).

Upon finding out that we were being asked to do this (not just on that particular project - but every project we do - whether or not the client was a dumbass) we went back to doing it correctly - right up until this most recent clusterfuck.  After calming down a bit - I was able to convince the guy (who I hopefully scared - at least a little bit) that we just needed to submit my drawings as-is, and only make changes if the client (another government client) actually requested that we do so.

I went back to my office, but the stress meant the rest of my day was fucking shot due to not being able to concentrate on shit.  We revisited the discussion right before I left, and he was right back to trying to convince me that we needed to redo the vast majority of the project as if we had never talked (this guy is super-smart when it comes to electronics/electrical stuff, but is an abject moron when it comes to just about everything else).

This morning we discussed it briefly again, and I have hopefully convinced him that we're going to use the idiotic calculations, up-size the wire - and if the owner of our company balks at the extra cost, telling him that the other option would be to add more power supplies (in addition to spending even  more time re-designing this stupid fucking project) - so it's basically a wash.  

 I'm currently pondering whether or not to just pull the owner in now, and pit him up against dipshit - because I'm basically being asked to 'fix' a functional design based on new criteria that doesn't make any sense, basically allowing a different client to dictate how we design.  I acknowledged to dipshit that his decision to kowtow to that client (and attempt to sidestep any future bitching by this client) is due to him being exhausted with having to argue with idiots - but this is a hill I would absolutely be willing to die on.

Now I get to see if I can stay focused enough to finish the rest of the project (I'm going to need to bring dipshit in for one last thing, which I can guarantee is going to be like pulling teeth) and get it the fuck out - just so they can eat it the fuck alive, and fuck me in the ass so hard I want to drive to wherever they are and spoon feed them their own feces.

This whole 'lets try to appease them before the fact' attitude is a massive waste of time - because (as I discussed with dipshit) while it's possible that they may obsess over the same thing as the other client, chances are their obsession will lie elsewhere, on some other aspect of the design.  It's also not a good precedent to set - allowing the lowest common denominator to dictate how we (who have designed and installed countless fully-functional systems) do our work.

He did have one good suggestion - that we could go to the codes officials (since it is dumbasses quoting/misinterpreting code to us that is driving this problem), present our case, and request an official interpretation - so that we will have something to point future dumbasses to when they attempt to dumbass.

I doubt that's going to happen though, we'll just keep being beholden to dumbasses - many of whom are simply bored and want to run us through the wringer in order to justify their own bloated wages.

The thing that gets me, is that if it's not Revit (as it was with my last job - and tangentially at this one as I've been describing in my previous posts) - it's the same fucking mentality keeping me from being able to do my job.  Once I get this thing done, I've got several other projects lined up behind it, and to be brutally honest, I don't know what the fucking point is anymore.

I think the only thing that keeps me going is that I'm not going to allow dumbasses and dipshits to break me.

The problem is that I may very well end up breaking (at least a few) of them.

-SkullFuck

 <<<UPDATE: The owner ended up coming to me for a status update (mainly because he's concerned about other projects piling up behind this one).  I informed him of the dipshit throwing a wrench in it (dipshit heard us talking and came in to be part of the conversation) and long story short - the owner agreed that we don't let the engineer on one project dictate how we design a project they aren't involved in - so we're back doing it the way I planned all along, and fuck the dipshit.

Oh and on a side note, I might've mentioned it before, but dipshit is also unsurprisingly our resident Covid denying, Fauci hating, Anti-Vaxx Trumptard who somehow manages to make every single conversation, regardless of topic, into a rant about 'libtards', 'tree huggers', etc. as if it has any bearing on what the fuck we are doing at any given point in time.

He just ducked his head into my office a few minutes ago and the first thing I said to him was 'fuck you'.  He laughed and we had a brief conversation - I'm pretty sure he's blissfully unaware of (i.e. too stupid to understand) how close he comes to dying on a daily basis.>>>

(Next Time: 'Let's order the equipment first - THEN design the project')

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