O

There is sort of a joking rivalry at my office between the designers and the engineers. We don't actually dislike each other. Most of the engineers I work with are very nice people and I'm sure they feel the same about most of my design group. But after we designers review and approve our work, we give it to the engineers for a final look, and they always come back to us with comments. Always.

So the designers joke that the engineers must need an ego boost, and that they just love to feel "superior" to us. Because a lot of their "corrections" are not technical. It's often stuff like, "I think it would look nicer if this text was underlined," or "I would prefer if you moved these notes down another inch," or "Instead of abbreviating the word drawing as 'dwg' I'd like you to spell the whole word out."

This morning I was away from my desk grabbing stuff off the printer when I got paged. Jeez. Someone needs me urgently enough that they can't wait for me to return a missed call. This must be important.

It was one of our engineers who is out on site. We are about 80% complete with the worst project I've ever worked on (I would take CREFS any day compared to this!)....

H: I have a comment for you on those 8 drawings you sent me.

Me: Okay. I've got them in front of me. What's the problem?

H: Where you specified that part number...it's supposed to be the letter O, but you typed the number zero. I need you to correct all those, re-sign them, and PDF the corrected drawings back to me.

Me: (are you effing kidding me???)...........um.............I understand what you're saying; that it should be the letter, not the number, but...........I mean.........I'm not really sure I see the problem.......the O and the zero look exactly the same.

H: Well I noticed it (with his bionic eyes???). And it would cause confusion down here if it's not fixed.



Yeah, Dude. I'm sure this is how it would go:

Installer 1: This part number says SB zero 2. That part number doesn't exist.

Installer 2: And certainly they would not have meant it to be SB letter O 2. Even though that's a valid part number, and the zero and the O's look exactly the same, but that can't possibly have been what they meant.

Installer 1: Yeah. We better report this horribly wrong design to the NRC and then initiate a brand new contract to fix the drawings to specify the actual part number that they meant it to be.



So great catch, H. I don't know what we'd have done without your insight......