How to Become a Better Person in Five Steps

1. Find a blog to read, preferably one you find annoying.
2. Become annoyed with blog.
3. Leave irritating comment for blogger.
4. Return to blog to confirm that blogger has indeed become irritated by your comment.
5. Enjoy that blissful, warm feeling of "Holier Than Thou."

Just read this glowing testimonial:

"[This blog is] useful to me. I read it and I remind myself how utterly annoying a constant complainer can be to other people, and I stop. Therefore, your blog makes me a better person!"

You’re a Better Person.

Great. Congratulations. Glad I could help.

Now scurry off, and be a Better Person on someone else’s comment page.

I know I'm not supposed to feed them, but they're just so darn cute!

Oh, goodiegoodiegoodie! I have caught a scaly little blog troll of my very own!

To celebrate this occasion, I have added a link to The Master Thwarter of All Trolls, The Misanthropic Bitch, to my blogroll.

My little troll-snack is served below:

I swear, I have never seen someone complain so much.

First, you have never “seen” me. This. Is. A blog. It is a slice of my life, not my entire life. It is a representation of my inner shrew; a place where I can complain every-fucking-day if I want to. I make the rules here. So suck it.

Second, visit that shiny new link I mentioned above. She has me beat by a mile.

Is there ever a day when you don't have a new ailment or something else to bitch about?

Yes, those would be the days between posts, when I’m off living my life, instead of leaving hatred-filled comments on other people’s blogs.

If you hate the work so much, get out!

If you hate the blog so much, get out!

You are making yourself unbearable, and I don't even know you!

No, you don’t know me, and I'm not sure why that would even be relevant. If the blog is “unbearable,” see above instructions; RE: Get out!

I only read your post to see what you are bitching about now (and, apparently, to leave this moronic comment), work or being sick or in pain.

So, that would make you...a masochist? In that case, you should be quite happy with what you read here- or unhappy, or however you psychos get off on self-inflicted pain.

Its amazing...Geez!

Yes, Anonymous, it is amazing that people must continue to flame on others in this manner, because they are too weak to say things like these to real humans in real life. What’s even more amazing is that you took the time to carefully pen this love letter to me, yet you couldn’t be bothered to come up with a more interesting pseudonym than “Anonymous.”

When I Googled the phrase “blog troll,” there were over 7 million results; with this amusing classification at the top of the list.

Twitchy McSpasm

I fear that the twitch I keep having in my left eye may become permanent.

Eyelid Twitch
Minor eyelid twitches require no treatment as they usually resolve spontaneously. Reducing stress, using warm soaks, or correction of any refractive error may help. Some ophthalmologists recommend reducing caffeine usage.

Yeah. I’m so hosed.

I wish AutoCAD had a neck...for the strangling.

I am, once again, working with the same old, crusty, needs-to-fucking-retire-already designer as on Project B. He is doing much of the same crap that drove me insane on the last project; such as putting transom windows above the doors to the electrical rooms, having windows the entire height of the exit stair towers, and centering window mullions on interior walls (walls that are between patient rooms, no less).

Also, Project PITA has some Labor and Delivery rooms, in which Design-o-saur has placed windows that go all the way to the ground. I hope you don’t mind having your “business” on display, ladies! We wouldn’t dare screw up Crusty Pants’s “design vision!”

I was working off of his sketches this morning, completely baffled as to why things weren’t fitting right, until I realized the scale was not 1/8”, as marked, but 1/16”. Idiot.

Retire.
Die.
Go get yourself stuck in a tar pit.
Whatever, just go the hell away.

In addition to the personnel fun, I am struggling with the software transition. Halfway through the 3-day long training, I almost started to change my tune about hating ADT. When the instructor showed how you could create an entire room schedule in less than a minute, I was nearly sold. Being able to put ceilings in the rooms with ease was a welcome change. I thought, “huh, maybe this stuff is ‘smart,’ after all.”

However.

The inevitable disconnection between “see how nicely everything works out on a rectangular, perfectly made from scratch model” and “real, live, actual project” is kicking me square in the ass.

Now, I consider myself a fairly smart monkey. I think, for the most part, that I pick things up pretty quickly. This, however, is not the case for ADT. Partially, I still don’t see the value, as some of the niftiest features aren’t even being used on Project PITA. We’re still drawing wall sections from scratch; ditto on the exterior elevations- instead of letting the “smart” software generate these for us. That means it is a complete waste of my time to enter the heights of everything if it’s only going to show up in plan.

Further, I can’t even get just the plans to behave. Whenever I get an interior wall near an exterior wall, it goes crazy and merges really strangely. I called CAD Coordinator to help me learn how to fix this, and his answer was, “Okay, select the wall. Now right-click. Pick (something) from the pull-down menu. Hit return. Okay, select the wall again. Right-click, then pick ‘reverse in place.’” The hell? I’m supposed to go through this retarded process (which only worked for him about 40% of the time) for every place the inside and outside walls interface?

I have had an inner monologue running on auto-loop all morning: “What the?!? Piece of! Fuck it, I’m leaving a gap between them! Moving on!”

I am an angry monkey, all of the time.

I am angry with the fact that my career is in virtual standstill due to not being able to give my employer a surgery date.
I am angry that I am not a designer, and because I know that now is not the time to try to become one in this company, because of aforementioned surgery dilemma.
I am angry that I have so few contacts in the architectural community, thus I can’t get anymore referral bonuses from getting more people hired on here.
I am angry that the young designers who sit next to me are getting more of their young-designer colleagues hired on, thus bumping me farther down the queue to becoming a designer myself.
I’m angry with myself for not growing a pair during the round of interviews that lead me to this job; I was honest about my capabilities, like a weenie, so that I was saddled with the title Project Coordinator, instead of Project Architect, as I should be.
I am angry that I don’t know how to go about changing that, or if I even have a vote in changing it.

This is a good place, I know it is, but I’m afraid I’m hurting my chances here with all this anger. Things have the potential to get better, but it won’t be overnight, or even in the near future. Patience is not one of my strong points, and I’ve already been dealing with crappy assignments and frustrating tasks for over a year now- I’m surprised I haven’t snapped and done something really stupid before now, as a matter of fact. The way it’s been manifesting lately is in my tendency to snip away at the number of hours I work per week. Monday, I called in sick and played World of Warcraft all day. Yesterday, I snuck out an hour early. Today, I sat and typed this entry, when I could have easily found some busywork to do.

After returning from the convention the office sent me to a few weeks ago, I had a renewed sense of purpose. I was motivated and inspired, even though I was assigned, once again, to work on nothing but wall sections for my next project. Too bad it didn’t last. It only lasted long enough for me to commit myself to creating a presentation that I now don’t want to give anymore.

Our office has begun the painful process of upgrading to AutoCAD 2005. An upgrade alone wouldn’t be so bad, if not for the fact that Corporate has insisted that we now use the ADT portion of the program for construction drawings- meaning everything is drawn in 3-D, using so-called “smart walls.”

I consider myself the last of a dying breed- those who once did actual hand drafting. Until graduation, I drafted everything by hand. Therefore, I have a tendency to use AutoCAD as a glorified electronic pencil. Because of Project B’s lingering for so long, I haven’t yet been able to attend the training for this software upgrade; this is causing much frustration on my part. I don’t know how to get the “smart walls” to behave themselves. If I try to move a door, sometimes it jumps into an entirely different wall. If I trim a wall, it moves a door that’s in the wall. Weird-angled walls (which the damn designers absolutely love to use) don’t fillet properly, causing gaps at the corners, and the appearance of an annoying “you’ve fucked up” red circle with crosshairs in it.

"Smart walls," my ass. Nobody has yet been able to show me what’s so friggin’ smart about them.

This whole concept was sold on the premise that it would give us the ability to draw all the walls, using wall styles, and then be able to simply “slice through the plan, creating an instant building section.”

In a meeting discussing wall sections for a project using The All-Powerful ADT, I asked a coworker, “are you using the ADT, or just regular lines to create these sections?”

“We’re creating them with regular lines.”

Nope, not seeing any “smart” yet.

I can see the relevance of drawing all the exterior walls in 3D, because those could be used to easily create exterior renderings and elevations. However, none of the project’s elevations have been created this way. We do have the ability to create a 3D rendering of the Housekeeping closets, though!

Whooo, “smart walls!”

In order to give me a task that I could do until I can attend training, I was charged with changing the wall styles in floor plan files from “standard style” to “Humongo approved style.”

Yesterday, the CAD Coordinator asked me, “How’s ADT treatin’ ya?”

“I hate it.”

CAD Coordinator assures me that, once I’ve had the training, I will learn to love ADT.

I said, “What I would love is if people would draw the damn walls as the correct style the first time.”

He said, “they couldn’t, because they didn’t know what wall types they were supposed to be yet.”

Let me translate: This means that, on every job, the walls will first be drawn as “standard,” then have to be changed to the correct wall styles later, next updated with the correct fire tape, and still have to be labeled with partition types.

Where’s the “smart,” again??

I hope whoever sold Corporate on the whole “smart wall” concept is enjoying his Hawaiian vacation. Or the absence of his soul. Whatever.

I knew I was right not to like Diet C0ke.

I have a temporary reprieve from Project B, while it's in the hands of the Contractor for pricing.

My latest assignment? Changing wall styles from "standard" to "Corporate-approved style" in floor plans.

I'm sooooo glad I got a Master's Degree, otherwise I couldn't do such stimulating work!