You know what annoys me? When I have to clean up someone’s mess. You know what I’ve been doing at work lately? Having to clean up someone’s mess.

AutoCAD drafting shouldn’t be too hard. Computers make it nice and easy to keep things precise, kinda by nature. With just a little discipline, it shouldn’t be too hard to keep things orthogonal and intersecting correctly. And yet, people manage to mess this up.

Maybe it’s a personal failing on my part, but minor misalignments, the kind that wouldn’t even show up until you zoom in far more than you really should, really bother me. It just seems to add unnecessary inaccuracies to a layout. The kinds that that would would propagate throughout a project until everything is wrong and impossible to fix without starting from scratch.

If I have a horizontal line, I expect that line to actually be horizontal. Not .03 degrees, not .003 degrees, but 0. Flat. No questions. When it isn’t, and I think it is, it just means that things aren’t going to even remotely add up. Like I said, all it takes is a little diligence, but apparently even that is sometimes too much.

Of course, the easy fix is starting over from scratch. But that’s not always possible in a work environment, when the other projects are piling up while you spend your time doing something that’s already been done. After a point, however, I start to wonder if the time and mental anguish I wasted trying to make sense of shoddy craftsmanship is more or less than the time it would have taken just to do things over.

Yes, I know I’m being vague. But I needed to get it off my chest without pissing anyone off. Is it really that hard to take just a bit more time and do things right from the start? I obviously don’t think it is, but apparently not everyone does.