Detail of the Week: When Good Drawings Go Bad

Well, not so much the drawings, perhaps, as the contractors reading the drawings incorrectly with big-time consequences. Generally, when a contractor reads a drawing and isn't sure what's being represented or think he or she is reading it incorrectly, the contractor will call the architect or ask the question in a Request For Information, or an RFI. My present contractor on Wheatlands is really good about this. Mark calls and asks me the question, then we work through it, then he issues an RFI to confirm our decision. Interestingly, this saves us time overall because we both worked through the solution instead of me issuing him a solution that might still not work or might cause more problems than it solves.

However...sometimes it doesn't occur to the contractor to ask. They assume their reading is correct and do something totally unintended. Sometiems these errors are huge, and sometimes, they're silly, like our first detail. This was on a project of a former colleague of Sarge's. We often note details in a plan by putting a dashed circle or rectangle around the detail and note the sheet and detail number off to the side and connect the detail and sheet number to the dashed circle with a line called a leader line. This sort of detail is shown on the right. However, the contractor interpreted this as the edge of the top step and built it as shown on the left. As the architect commented to Sarge, "They built the fucking leader line."Guy passed this around his office, and one of his colleagues noted that the stair as built violates code. Because of this, as well as because they didn't build it as the architect drew it, the architect would be completely in his right to tell the contractor to tear this out and build it correctly. Building codes require that the height of any step (called a riser) be of a minimum height, and this stair likely doesn't meet that. Look at the plan; only three stairs (four risers) are shown, but the contractor had to do the math to change the height of each riser in order to make what he thought was the extra riser but was actually the leader line between the detail and sheet number and the rectangle around the detail.

Below is another detail on a project a friend of mine worked on several years ago. This is a drywall soffit in a hallway. You can see the lines that go from the wall to the edge of the curved soffit; those are control joints, which allow large expanses of drywall to expand and contract with heat. But see the line running longways down the soffit?

That line is actually a grid line. A grid line is an imaginary line that runs through the center of the structural columns and is used not only to locate the columns and beams but is also used to help dimension other things in the floor plans and ceiling plans. So, the outer edge of the curve of this soffit was dimensioned off this gridline. However, the contractor read this in reverse--he thought that the architect was trying to show an architectural reveal in the underside of the soffit dimensioned off the edge of the soffit. While this doesn't violate any codes, it just looks doofy. it's the only soffit in the hall with this line in it. "They built the grid line in, Pixie!" my friend sighed. "It looks different from everything else on the plan, but they read it like it was a reveal! What the hell?"

I'll have something more amusing tomorrow, but believe me, when we passed these details around our office, we howled with laughter.

I know, I know...we're total archinerds....

Crouching tiger, peeing dragon

I awoke nearly half an hour early this morning to hear the sound of water hitting cloth and sat straight up in bed to witness my little cat--my good cat, Hazel--peeing on my wool deep-pile bedside rug. She squatted, whizzed, stood up, looked at me...and sauntered off. Not moseyed, but sauntered, y'all. I leapt out of bed, snatched the rug off the floor, and rushed to the bathroom to throw it in Guy's tub. Before rinsing it out, I chased Hazel down under the dining room table, scruffed her, and brought her back to the scene of the crime. Sufficiently understanding the magnitude of her transgression, she sprang from my arms across the bathroom like she was auditioning for Fame.

I rinsed the pee from the deep-pile rug and let it dry for a while hanging over the tub. The problem with washing this rug is that it's 30 inches by 60 inches and made of wool. Heavy-ass wool. So wee little me wrestling with this huge wet sheep is an exercise in, well, exercise. There's a reason I only wash these things once a year; I look like Lucy Ricardo mashing grapes in a vat with my feet. It's still hanging over my shower door where it's been drying all day and will have to dry all night as well.

Damn cat. She still managed to forgive me by 7am and nuzzle my leg for a treat.

Strike two.

Today was tough to get into--even though I thinned a lot of my work email inbox last night, I still had a pile of items for both Wheatlands and Pomme de Terre this morning. I decided to prioritize and do the Wheatlands stuff first because that building's actually getting built right now. I had questions on what's going to be involved in the new ambulance garage, how can we terminate the metal panels against the aluminum windows, and so on. Suddenly, my job superintendent, Mark, asked me about a change I was going to be issuing soon.
"Hey, Pixie, about this PR where you're putting a drywall ceiling in the two storage rooms in the clinic," Mark said. "Two different guys from our code consulting company came out here and signed off on the storage rooms as they were. What's your change about?"
I was bumfuzzled. My mechanical engineer and I discovered that the walls around two storage rooms had the wrong kind of walls around them. In an attempt to make a long story short, the walls won't stop smoke from passing out of them into the rest of the clinic and administrative offices in the event that a fire were to start in these rooms. When my engineer and I called the code guys, they agreed that we should put a hard lid in the rooms as a ceiling instead of putting those acoustical tiles in the ceilings and put small air grilles in the hard ceiling with dampers on them to stop smoke if any is detected. But in the field, these same guys are telling my super that it's all good in da hood. I put in a call to the head code guy; if I don't hear from him by 9am tomorrow, I'm opening a can of whoop-ass.

It was a quiet morning, overall. Sarge was teaching a Revit class and half the office was out at a meeting in the snowy, nasty Denver weather. I noticed, with some disgust, that Wanda was still in the office. But alas, she was quiet. As I finished up lunch, Sarge walked by my desk to see if I wanted to go for a quick stroll to get out of the office for a bit. I agreed, slurped down the rest of my soup, and threw on my coat.

"So?" I asked. "What's the word, bird?"
"Okay," said Sarge. "You saw that Liz and I went into a conference room with Howie on Thursday, right?"
"Yeah, but I didn't see y'all leave. What happened?"
"Well, we described Wanda's hissy fit and subsequent leaving of the meeting and the office," Sarge said as he tucked his chin into his coat. "I explained my concerns about Wanda's behavior from a CAD manager's standpoint, and Liz described her concerns from a project manager's standpoint."
"Right, then what?" I asked, shaking fat snowflakes out of my hair like frosty dandruff.
"Well, Howie asked us to take him through our concerns and through what was said, step by step. We had to fully explain the attack she unleashed at Elliot in the CAD meeting." He shook his head. "God, poor Elliot. He's just helping out part time on Pomme de Terre, and she was pissed about something, and she just jumped on him. He asked a simple question, and she acted like it was character assassination."
"So what did Howie say?" I asked.

Sarge had to pull his hands out of his pockets to gesture suddenly. "Oh man, we were explaining everything, and Howie kept saying 'You gotta be kidding me!' over and over," he replied.
"Really?" I was actually shocked. "So he was truly blown away by all this? He's clued in finally on how ridiculous and disturbing this is?"
"Completely," Sarge finished. He stopped on the corner and raised his eyebrows. "When we finished, Howie looked at us and said 'This is Strike Two.' I'm tempted to make it Strike Three, but I'm gonna call it Strike Two and talk to her again."
I could do nothing but high-five Sarge.

So it seems that Wanda is On Notice. On Serious Notice. Howie is pretty distant and tends to let his projects run themselves because he's worked hard to gather highly competent people around him, but he's just as fierce, evidently, about thinning the herd when they threaten the efficacy and efficiency of his team. A few months ago before Jacqueline left, Howie fired a gal after only a month when it became very clear that she had way oversold her abilities and was unable to actually work on a project. Not only that, but the gal was unfriendly and sullen. DA is a pretty buddy-buddy place, and antisocial behavior is not rewarded. Quite the opposite, really. So, I take this to be a good sign. If she can chew a 'lude, we'll get a lot done and she'll be great to work with. If not, Howie will kick her hissy-fit-having ass to the curb. I think this is what's known as a win-win situation.

Better.

Wow, do I feel better. We both feel better.

I have no idea what awaits me tomorrow at DA. I don't even have the energy or focus to be stressed about it. Las Vegas was mag-freaking-nificent. Four nights in a king-bed suite with a marble-tiled bath and a 69,000 sf spa downstairs and mad crazy lights everywhere and people-watching the weirdest mofos on the planet on one four-mile strip of road and standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon and being amazed that it actually is pretty damn grand and shopping at the big-ass Sephora store and walking around in your Audrey-Hepburn black Ann Taylor dress and the cutest shiny little black shoes ever at Emeril's in the MGM Grand and having your husband lean over and say "all the women are looking at you!" and having a small European woman rub you with hot basalt stones and oil for 80 minutes and having an exercise physiologist tell you that you're in even better shape than you were a year ago and laughing your ass off at a comedy show and strolling through the Forum Shops at Caesar's in your superfly leather pants and eating gelato while the fountains dance in front of the Bellagio...gives you perspective. And peace.

We partied like rock stars if rock stars started yawning at 9pm and had to be in bed by 11. In our defense, we were up pretty early every morning so we could make Bellagio's champagne brunch, get out of town to get to the Grand Canyon and back, etc. The nice thing about Vegas is that if you do it right, you can walk off a lot of your fantastic meals there. From Mandalay Bay to the Stratosphere is four miles, though most of the action is between Luxor and the Wynn/Fashion Show Mall, which is more like 2-3 miles. The Stardust, just north of Fashion Show Mall, was just demolished to make way for a new fantastic resort/casino/megaplex, can't recall if it was for some Trump abomination.

We returned home to our two cats, Maddy and Hazel, who nearly overwhelmed us with their lukewarm welcome. It appeared that they'd been doing lines of catnip on the glass-topped Crate and Barrel dining room table, and they've been in the Bailey's again. Dammit. I just can't keep them on the wagon, those two. Actually, they were excited to see us until we fed them. Then, it was whut-evuh, talk to the paw. Maddy did jump in Guy's lap and snuggle up for a bit, but then Hazel walked in and she had to be cool again.

I'm sure I'll have crazy news tomorrow, sure the madness will return. But for now, I feel really, really good. Rested. (Okay, I am kinda sore from my personal training session and yoga class yesterday, but otherwise I do feel good.)

My building is pretty, and I'm going to the spa.

So Howie and I made the long trek this morning to see Wheatlands. I've alluded to Wheatlands a time or two, but it's my primary project that's nearly complete with construction. I started working on it back in October of 2005, when we met with the hospital staff to get the locations of the departments in the right places on the site. Wheatlands Hospital is in Wheatlands, Kansas, and it's presently a 30,000 square foot building, most of which dates back to 1950. They added on an "updated" patient wing back in 1994, but it's got serious funk. So, we're giving them a new replacement facility that's more than twice the size of what they have now.

We drove out for an OAC meeting; OAC stands for Owner-Architect-Contractor. Everyone gets together to make sure construction's going well, talk about potential problems, and make sure things are generally being taken care of. Wheatlands is nearly done and opens in June, so it's looking really nice. The metal panel on the exterior entryway was being installed, and the rep from the hospital had to get his knickers in a twist because it wasn't the metallic color he wanted/pictured. That's right, I told him. We too wanted it to be a metallic color, but when we looked at metal samples with the rest of the building's exterior, it wasn't going to look good. So, we went with a light tan that was originally shown on the building that the hospital board approved over a year ago. On of my many jobs as an architect is to save the client from themselves now and then. We'll see if the hospital rep gets over it or not--i don't know if he'd be happy if you beat him with a brand new stick. Meanwhile, the rest of the building walk went well. I took some great photos for a fantastical lovely detail of the week next week, but alas, there shall be none this week. I'm going to the spa.

We had a great trip and site visit. This has been the smoothest building construction I've seen in 6+ years. Too bad Howie and I had to return to pandemonium. We got back to the office in time for me to fix a few things and do some filing before I left, and I see my dear coworker Jimmy Ray come out of a Pomme de Terre CAD meeting rubbing his temples. "Kill. Me. Now," he said.
"What's wrong?" I said. "Were you just in a CAD meeting?"
He nodded. "Wanda prnounced that 'ADT sucks', said 'well evidently I'm a distraction', and stormed out. She actually left the office for the day just now."
I rolled my eyes. "Okay, first of all, 'ADT sucks' is my line," I retorted. "I said that in the fall of 2005 on Wheatlands, so she owes me royalties."
Jimmy Ray rocked back in his chair. "That's right! She owes you money, g! That's your line!"
"Plus," I said. "you can't say that ADT sucks until you actually use it. She's just been butchering it for three months."
Jimmy Ray nearly fell out of his chair laughing.

I later saw Sarge, who shook his head sadly and rummaged through my desk in search of an icepick. "There's always your car door," I said in an attempt to console him.
Liz was reviewing some drawings with Howie at his desk the last time I looked up. When I looked up again a few minutes later, Howie was talking in a quiet corner with Liz and Sarge. I heard Howie suggest a conference room. That was at 3:55. They were still talking when I left at 4:50. Am I going to hell for hoping that Wanda leaves or is asked to leave? I really wish she'd just chew a 'lude and take it easy, but I don't know if she's capable of speaking without hostility at this point. It might be better if she just went elsewhere and started over again.

However...

...it's hard to fully care right now...

...because I'm going to the spa.....

(Oh, don't get all pissed; we're coming back Tuesday.)

I'd like to care, but I'm going to the spa.

It's been getting harder and harder to focus the past couple of days, because Mile High Guy and I are going to Las Vegas on Friday for our two-year anniversary. We go to Vegas because that's where we pledged our troth before God and Elvis in 2005, and we enjoyed the place so much that we return to escape reality, be together, and party like rock stars for our anniversary weekend. I should go back briefly and say something again: yes, we got married in Las Vegas; and yes, we had an Elvis wedding. It was a supreme blast: we were pronounced hound dog and teddy bear and our family members with high-speed internet connections watched the whole thing on the chapel's webcam. We got married because it was important to us to have a legal binding contract of our emotional connection in case (God forbid) something happened to one of us. However, because we also think weddings are a billion-dollar bullshit industry, we got married in Vegas with Elvis and chose to have separate parties with our respective families after the fact. Airfare, wedding, Elvis' fee and tip, hotel, meals, and wedding rings totaled less than $5,000.

Damn right I'm bragging.

Anyway, the first time we went to Vegas, we stayed at Circus Circus. It used to be the shizznit in the '60s, but most folks will recognize it from the movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, starring Johnny Depp as the eternally-intoxicated journalist Hunter S. Thompson. I'd like to state for the record that Circus Circus is best experienced while sniffing ether, not because we did so, but because the decor is so loud and surreal that it might have helped.

The next time, we decided to go a bit more upscale. We were trying to decide between all the nicer, newer resorts when I saw that the Venetian had a spa. Not just a spa, but a Spa. Oh, my bad, a SPA. The famous Canyon Ranch Spa (of Tucson AZ and Lenox MA) had a 69,000 sf outpost at the Venetian. My hospital, Wheatlands, is smaller than this spa, my chirren. I had to go. I booked an appointment with an exercise physiologist for a fitness assessment and a stone massage. I got great results with the assessment (which proved that all my hard work in the gym paid off), and I was so relaxed from the massage that I floated the rest of the weekend. Nice.

I've booked a bunch of spa appointments this year as well, and yes, I'm bragging again. Assessment, personal trainer session, stone massage, manicure, and pedicure. I'm gonna lay around in the marble steam room, relax with a cappucino whie watching the indoor gondolas float by and listen to the gondoliers (all trained opera singers) sing in perfect Italian, dine lavishly with Guy after he whips ass in his poker tournaments (he won $450 in one last year), and enjoy my time not being at work and not being worried.

Wanda was pretty quiet today, and everyone seemed like they were in a calmer mood. I'm going to Wheatlands with Howie tomorrow, which means a little over three hours each way in a car with my boss. But I can't say I care. I'm going to the spa.

Oh. My. God. Yes!

Oh, WAD Readers, it’s been a good day. A good day indeed. Let’s hit rewind on the DVR of my day and take y’all back to the beginning.

The day began with a Pomme de Terre Core & Shell team CAD meeting, consisting of Sarge, Liz, Wanda, and Intern Timmy, a young fellow just out of graduate school who’s been working at Design Associates for about a year and a half. Sarge was working through some of the 3D modeling issues with the team, and Wanda was being extra obstinate and combative. By the end of the meeting, it was clear that she didn’t want to model the building in 3D at all, even though a 3D building model is what Howie has had in mind all along. Sarge came out of the meeting, barely paused at my desk to look over my head at my coworker, Jimmy Ray, sitting in the cubicle just over a low wall from me.

“Jimmy Ray, I need an icepick to go in my temple,” he said, pressing a pen the side of his head. I noticed that his hand was shaking; he was actually putting pressure on the pen. He returned a few minutes later and IM’d me that the meeting had been so stressful, and Wanda had been so aggressive and confrontational, that he had to go outside and take a walk. The walk didn’t end up helping, and now Susanna needed help, but he couldn’t bring himself to go downstairs. See, Susanna sits in a cubicle over a low wall from Wanda, and he knew Wanda would try to pull him into to a verbal altercation.
“It’s like she calls me down to her desk not for CAD help or advice, but just to pick a fight with me,” Sarge said.
“I wonder what her deal is,” I replied.
“Let’s get out of this office for lunch,” said Sarge. “I cannot be in this office for lunch today.”

A while later when we went to lunch, Sarge was nearly leaping with an odd joy. “Oh—my—GOD!” he exclaimed. “I saw Liz upstairs and pulled her aside to explain that I want to help Pomme de Terre, but I just couldn’t come downstairs because I didn’t think I could keep my cool around Wanda. Liz drags me into a conference room and tells me she feels the same way!”
“No way!” said the Pixie. “So we’re not imagining things? Liz is annoyed by her too?”
“Completely!” Sarge was nearly gushing. He looked relieved just knowing that someone else on the PdT team felt as he did, as we did. “It’s not just us! Liz is exhausted by Wanda too, and she too feels like Wanda’s charging into everything with a Mortal Kombat attitude. She said she was thinking about bringing it up with Howie, and she asked if I’d be willing to give Howie my side of the story, and I said abso-freaking-lutely. Before I got to your desk, I went to see if she wanted to go to lunch with us, but she wasn’t at her desk.”
He paused with an expression of sudden realization. “…and neither was Howie.” He looked at me suddenly. “Hey, I wonder….”
“She probably just got out of the office for a bit,” I said.

Sarge and I ate lunch and walked back to the office. As we got to the corner across the street from our office, we saw Howie walking up the sidewalk in the other direction. Suddenly, he dashed across the street to us at a break in the traffic and dashed right up to Sarge.
“Hey, did Wanda pick a fight with you in the CAD meeting today?” he asked Sarge, slightly out of breath.
Sarge was actually caught a bit off guard. I stood not two feet away thinking, um, Howie? Maybe you should wait til I’m not around to discuss personnel issues with the CAD Manager.
“Well,” Sarge said rather diplomatically. “I don’t think that’s how she meant it to be, but it sure felt like she was trying to pick a fight. It’s like that a lot when I go to her desk.”
“Yeah, I know she can be kinda intense sometimes,” Howie replied, a little sheepish. “I think I need to talk with her…”
Just then the light changed, and I excused myself without a word and crossed the street, leaving Howie and Sarge on the street corner to continue sorting this crap out.

A few minutes later, Sarge came in and walked right up to my desk, saying, “Holy fucking shit at the timing of that!”
“So? What was the outcome of that little meeting in DA’s new corner conference room?” I asked.
“Awesomeness!” Sarge said with an uncharacteristic lack of military decorum. “I explained to Howie how it’s so hard to have a discussion with her without her turning it into an argument, and I told him how I had to reassure Liz that I wasn’t trying to neglect the team but I just couldn’t be down there near her and keep my cool. Then, Howie said that he just talked to Liz about this, and he said he’s taken Wanda off all file and administrative duties and has gone back to just giving her just drawings to do. Intern Timmy and Jimmy Ray are gonna handle the files from now on.”

Everyone around us stared us while we happy danced at this most fortuitous outcome. Our poor confused coworkers watched in bemused horror as the guy with the buzzcut and the midget in the grey plaid Ann Taylor suit did the watusi and the frug and sang “Booyah! Booyah! Booyah!”

Now, I realize that the proper and assertive thing to have done here would have been for Liz or me or Sarge or someone to approach Wanda and broach the subject of her combative, disagreeable nature with her. One would thank her for her willingness to deal with certain aspects of the advanced software and appreciate her previous experience with it, then empathize with the fact that she’d been given a management task for which she wasn’t totally prepared, namely handling the file structure for software on which she wasn’t fully trained. Then one would gently explain that everyone is willing to help train her, but she has on several occasions made it seem like she didn’t want to listen. If she will let the others help her and teach her how to use the software, then the others would stick up for her if learning the software put her behind or gave her problems with Howie.

However…when someone is continually confrontational, how does one confront them? Given all that we’ve seen, I think Liz did the best thing. If Jacqueline was here, she would have seen it already first hand and dealt with it, but Howie, the project manager (PM, as Faded properly calls him), didn’t have a clue and needed to know that this was going on. By taking this responsibility out of her hands, Howie has dramatically reduced opportunities for Wanda to be aggressive. Also, by checking with more than one person about the behavior, he got a better idea of the team’s dynamics. (Howie and I will be going out to Wheatlands together on Thursday, so he may get my side of the story, if and only if he asks me.) So finally—FINALLY, something has been done. I can finally almost enjoy this project. Almost.