Lost a whole set of blueprints to a coffee spill last Wednesday

I was in the middle of marking up a commercial HVAC layout for a downtown Omaha job when my thermos tipped over and soaked through three pages of redlines, had to redo the whole thing from memory and eat the overtime.

3 comments

3 Comments

wendysanchez6d ago

Oh man, that's brutal! I felt that one in my gut. I once had a whole set of stamped prints for a school renovation get hit by a leaky coffee cup lid right before a city review meeting. Had to stay until midnight recreating all my load calcs and notes, and of course nobody paid me for the extra time. Really sorry you went through that, it's the worst kind of setback when you're already under the gun.

the_aaron6d ago

That coffee lid tax is just life's way of charging you for caring too much.

xenaf516d ago

The 24 hour diner near my office actually keeps a "midnight redo" punch card for engineers like us. Six more stamps and I get a free burnt coffee. But seriously, that coffee lid trick is like the universe's way of testing if you really care about your career. I bet the city reviewer didn't even notice the freshly printed set, they probably just put it in the pile with everyone else's. And the unpaid overtime? That's just the standard "passion tax" we pay for the privilege of being architects. Hope you at least got a sympathetic head nod from someone, because that's about all the compensation we ever see.