Drafting 101

My work group has been a little slow the past couple of weeks waiting for paperwork to be authorized for our next project. So meanwhile, I am helping out a different group with some of their drafting. The kid I was assigned to work with is someone I've never met before, so I don't know his skills and he doesn't know mine. He's been training me on the drafting standards of his client, but in doing so, he acts like he's teaching me CAD at the same time. Like, "The first step is to draw a box that's going to be the border. To draw a box, you click on this toolbar icon that looks like a box....."

No shit. I took Drafting 101 like 10 years ago.

So we are working with client drawings that were hand-drafted like 40+ years ago and have been sitting in a drawer somewhere becoming increasingly faded and illegible. And when this kid, K, requested the drawings from the client a couple weeks ago, someone at the site dug those Mylars out of the drawer, scanned them as a tif file, and emailed them to K. So now when I insert these tif images into a CAD file, they are not really great quality. So part of my job is to re-type some of the important information on the drawing to make it more legible. But, since the tif image sucks, it's kind of hard to read the illegible stuff, so that makes it impossible for me to re-type it legibly, since the tif image sucks........it's a vicious circle of crap.

So I had to leave some of the information on the drawing as an illegible tif since, what was I supposed to do about it? So K comes over to my desk this morning:

K: I was reviewing the stuff you drafted and had a couple of comments. On these 4 drawings, you need to re-type this title block info so that it's legible.

Me: But....the tif isn't legible. So I don't know what it's supposed to say. So how am I supposed to re-type it?

K: Did you know there is a "Zoom" function in CAD?

Again, Dude, I took Drafting 101 like 10 years ago. Yes, I do know about "Zoom." I bet my 3-year-old nephew could be zooming circles around you within 2 seconds of opening CAD. Rolling the wheel on the top of the mouse....yeah. I got that one figured out. Thanks.

Me: Yeah. I know how to zoom.

K: If you open up the CAD file and zoom in, sometimes you can read it.

Hmm. Sounds like maybe you need to take Drafting 101 K, because zooming into a shitty tif file only makes the pixels bigger....not clearer.

Thanks for the great advice, Dude. That's much more legible now......