Imperfection

After a week off where I actually surprised myself by not checking in too much at work and focusing on why we vacation in the first place, I thought I had actually figured out this whole "recharge" thing.  Short work week ahead and a shack to paint over the holiday weekend, plus 3 straight days of outdoor riding, hanging with the fam, what's not to like?

How naive.

By 8:30 AM on Monday morning all of the angst that I had so laboriously squeezed out of the system over seven days rushed back in, not unlike a CO2 cartridge filling a replacement tube in its speedily efficient manner.  I'll be putting in some hours this weekend to hit some deadlines.  Work is work, and no one cares how hard it can be, because we're all busy.  At least we're gainfully employed, and in my profession, not being busy is a death knell.

So I "drilled down" (current overused business term du jour--same genus, phylum, and species as "at the end of the day") into my fragile psyche and realized that the daily battles all have to do with accepting imperfection.  Even such mundane issues as whether or not the foundation wall lines up exactly with the face of stud--no matter how carefully we draw these things (by hand or on CAD), figure out the dimensional math (2 & 3D), and convey such info on drawings, they will still be misinterpreted in some fashion along the way, as it gets passed from me to estimator to project manager to superintendent to stake-out surveyor to concrete subcontractor to framing subcontractor to masonry subcontractor...(like a dynamic game of telephone or post office or whatever message mangling game we played as kids) to result in an imperfect condition, like so:

I could be a hardcase who likes to bust balls and order the work to be torn out just because I have that power, or accept the fact that everything these days is overengineered for self-preservation purposes, resulting in work that has to be corrected in a manner that keeps the project going but does not compromise life safety and is ultimately hidden behind finish work.  I choose the latter.  Only real assholes flex their muscles in the unnecessary manner that satisfies small egos; kind of like some of my critics in architecture school who actually drew on peoples presentation drawings during juries to make a point.  Unnecessary and uncool.

Anyway, when deadlines are coming hard and fast, I chant the mantra:  "the perfect is the enemy of the good".  If I strove for perfection, I don't think I would ever finish a drawing.