33/M
Interested in self-hosting, decentralization, and learning more about the fediverse.

I also do photography, but with digital cameras from the 90’s.

  • 0 Posts
  • 5 Comments
Joined 3 months ago
cake
Cake day: June 4th, 2025

help-circle



  • My grandfather was a draftsman for one of the big military contractors back in the day. He’s got some of his old work framed, it’s really amazing what the human hand used to accomplish with only a straightedge and a compass… As an engineer who uses a lot of Solidworks, sometimes I romanticize and yearn to blow everything up and return to the artful days of hand-drafting as the standard.

    My first job out of college was re-making tools to manufacture small electromechanical assemblies for repairing old military aircraft. (Said tools had been thrown away by some previous now-fired director who thought “We haven’t used these tools in 15 years, surely we don’t need them anymore…”, but when the military calls up and asks for part XYZ for a B52 that you’ve manufactured for the last 65 years, you don’t say no, even if you haven’t made the part in 2 decades). I had an entire room full of B, C, and D-sized hand-drafted drawings to pull specs and dimensions from, and each one was so beautiful in its own way. Getting to spend a whole day digging through drawings was always a nice little quiet retreat from the rest of the chaotic world.


  • I’m not in IT, but I was trying to get a coworker to send me a file they were supposed to have generated. I sent them a PDF and I wanted them to update it with current procedures (they were the area supervisor) and type it out in a word doc so it could be edited and rev controlled.

    They never got back to me, 2 weeks passed. It was a 2 page document, so I emailed them to ask if they had finished. They responded that oh yeah they had finished a while ago, and I could find the completed document attached.

    They sent me back the original PDF I sent them. After a confused follow up email, they again sent me back the original PDF.

    I went over to their desk, which I had never been to before, usually I interface with them out on the assembly line. I was like “Hey what’s up, could you send me the .Doc file you created?”

    Their response? “I forget what I named it so I can’t find it.”

    I am even more confused. After some general troubleshooting I ask them to open their documents folder, which they did not know how to do. It didn’t matter because it was empty. They then close out of Outlook, which had been fullscreened the whole interaction.

    Their desktop was the most densely packed jumble of hundreds of files I have ever seen. Not snapped to grid.

    Turns out every document they ever interact with gets saved to their desktop permanently, and to find things they use Windows search. This explains why I kept getting back the original PDF, they searched for the name of what the file was supposed to be, and they just grabbed the first result without looking and slapped it in the email.

    I ended up finding the document by showing them how to open a finder window, navigate to their desktop, and sorting by “last modified”, then asking them what day they remember finishing the document. It was named New Document.doc.

    It ended up being so bad I had to completely re-do it myself anyway.