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!”