[edit 10/24 12noon] So a week ago Wensday, something happened which added an entirely unexpected flavor to this vacation: I lost my job after 30 years with the company.
It's not like I shouldn't have seen it coming; business had been bad for months, I had heard rumors that the partners--I worked for 5 partners--had been paying some bills out of their own pockets, and I had had very few billable hours in the previous month. Still, it came as a shock, because I had been there 30-1/2 years. My immediate supervisor, Eric, is more than 10 years younger than me, but the Head of the Surveying Dept., Tom, is only 1 year older, and the top "Managing Partner", Mike, is only 2 years older, and i had known his sister in high school.
I wasn't the first CAD draftsman the company had had. They hired a fresh graduate of community college, Sheri, to start us in CAD. But i knew that was where the future of drafting was headed, and i have a natural empathy with computers, so the day we got CAD software was the day I started playing with it. Sheri was not particularly imaginative, and had never drawn engineering drawings. Later I overheard Mike once saying that it was easier to teach CAD to an engineering draftsperson, than engineering drawing to a CAD person.
When she left after 28 months, I knew enough CAD to be offered her job. In fact it has a slight relevance to this vacation blog: I was offered the job, and a 23% raise, on the eve of my first Greyhound bus trip to Florida, in March, 1990. I left Ohio a manual draftsperson of 11 years, returned as a brand new CAD draftsperson. For about 5 years, I WAS the CAD Dept. I drew, or edited Sheri's, predrawn assemblies, called "blocks", symbols to represent items in every topographical survey, like manholes and water valves, that we use to this day, though they have been smartened up with masking underneath and dynamic scaling to take advantage of changes in the CAD software.
I always had the biggest, baddest, damnest computer in the office, because CAD needed the most powerful computers available. Sheri had started on a 16mhz computer and sometimes her regenerations of her drawings would take an hour. By the time I took over, the fastest computer in the office was 25mhz, but still a regen could take an hour or even longer. I was the only full-time CAD draftsman, at one point there were 4 others dabbling in it, but they all had a computer i had set up and used, so that i could help all of them with computer problems because they were all using one of my old computers.
I could see business was pretty bad, but I thought I had tenure, just because of this history. Now perhaps i can see why it was me. A year ago a new CAD draftsman was laid off, this time an part-time draftman went too, that left 4 full-time draftsmen. Josh is a 10-year associate, hired by the company fresh from community college, but he is Phi Beta Kappa, a whiz kid with computers and software. He had the time to figure out how to work the lastest version of CAD software, civil 3-d, because he was our engineering draftsman, and engineering jobs usually have enough hours budgeted to allow it. That got him the reputation of being a master Computer Guru that the company thought was worth paying more for. Chad's been with the company for 15 years and been full-time CAD for maybe 10, but he's also the surveyors' main go-to guy and the liason with the field crews. Dave is a 25-year veteran of the company, having started with a surveying company that our company bought out, has been in CAD for about 15 years and manual drafting before that, but he's also worked with the engineer of that company the entire time and functions as office manager for that office.
So that leaves little old me, 19 years in CAD but may have been thought of as the least specialized of the CAD people, which i would prefer to say the most versatile, but i had developed the preference of just drafting, not doing a lot of the push-button engineering stuff that the CAD software will now accomplish, i just wanted to draw. I brought to the survey plat a background of graphic design, 34 years ago i was a graphic designer with an ad agency that produced "junk mail", and i always assessed the attractiveness and readability of my drawings to the point, perhaps excessive, of thinking many were good-looking enough to be hung on the wall, almost as art. Also in my defense, I will add that i didn't need all the new-fangled bells and whistles in the CAD program so i didn't bother learning them, but i think i could have, given the time, because after all, i had learned and used ACOGO, DCA, Softdesk, and Land Desktop, civil 3-d's predecessors.
