I'm not finished, but I'm done.

Seriously. I'm there.

I'll spare you the gory details because they make me so angry, but my structural consultant on TCMC (who's never given me a bit of trouble in nearly ten years) hasn't really looked at the drawings in a month until his QC guy noticed that we were removing a bunch of walls that he needed to remain in order to carry some roof loads. He notices this on Monday, and then he notices again on Wednesday when I called him to ask him about his final revisions to his plans that were due later that day. He blamed the lack of oversight on a tight budget, but come. on. We removed five exterior walls from this area of the building in the drawings two months ago. Spend half an hour with the drawing set and I think that would become clear pretty quickly.

Thing is, architecture is done, and structural is done. We're waiting on mechanical to reconfigure their ductwork with all these new walls and beams suddenly in the space where they weren't before. Mechanical has not impressed me so far on this project...well, up until now. They've really stepped up after the contortions that structural gave us so late in the game, and I appreciate it like hell. And Howie says we're probably going to owe them a li'l cash when this is over. Rightfully so--I'm sure they've gone way over their fee for reasons that were completely out of their control. But the fee thing is killing everyone these days. In order to get jobs, we're all getting paid less because every client wants a deal, like they're buying their plans at Costco or something. But the project is at the point where no one can afford to work on it, which sends it into a death spiral of poor quality, and if we do a crappy job we won't get hired again, and then we won't get work....

Furthermore, I've had it with Howie on this project. He believed that when my structural guy called up all surprised about these walls that were "suddenly" missing, I should have called him on it and made him admit that he didn't look at my drawings. I didn't do that for two reasons: one, I had problems to solve. We can point fingers later, but right now I need everyone's cooperation in order to solve it in the short amount of time we have to get this done. And second, the engineer already admitted inadvertently that he hadn't looked at my drawings--he did so on Monday when he said, "I just the report back from my QC guy, and it appears that you guys are all of a sudden now taking out all the exterior walls in this area--is that correct?" It wasn't all of a sudden; the walls have been gone for about two months. And also, your QC saw this, not you? Busted. So no, Howie, I didn't give him grief when he said it, because I used my "psychic female intuition," which is commonly called "listening" and "making logical conclusions" to figure out in about 2.3 nanoseconds just exactly how this got missed. I didn't need to engage in your particular brand of a macho-man pissing contest in order to make him admit guilt. It doesn't satisfy me the way it does you. now get the fuck out of my way and let me finish this project.

So, I'm just done.

Today, we should be getting the mechanical engineer's information, and we'll work with him some to make sure that nothing in his model is colliding with anything important in any other model, and then we'll print the drawings and be done. The submittal to the state health department will have to happen next week by someone other than me, because I'm gone-baby-gone to Georgia for a week. And if those dipshits are lucky, I'll check my email periodically to see if anyone has any questions.

Guess who needs a massage and a nap?