What A Day – Oliver the Engineer…

What a day!  Today was what I thought was a just a normal Monday.  I was upbeat, ready to take over the world, and ready to accomplish anything that came along my way.  So I did my normal routine.  Head over to Starbucks, get my vente Ice Mocha with no whip.  Then headed off to work on my normal route.

This morning I decided to listen to an audiobook verses my normal pop morning routine.  The audiobook for this morning’s commute was Danielle Laporte’s Fire-Starter Sessions.  I purchase the audiobook last night.  I also purchased the book as well.  But lately I’ve notice that I’ve become more distracted with reading again.  I don’t know if I just have the gears in my head turning constantly or that I’m just easily distracted with all things social media.  I can’t really pinpointed right now but I need to figure it out before it gets out of hand.  But lately I’ve decided to listen to books verses reading them and not because I’m lazy but because I want to do more with my time.  This has come true a lot lately especially while I’m at work.

So after my normal 20 minute commute to work.  I arrived at worked earlier than usual and thinking that I wouldn’t get a good parking spot.  But to my amazement I found one and it was for sure the last one.  Now this day was looking good.  So I turned off the car and turned off my GPS app on the Phone and headed into the office.

Now with a card swiped and racing up the stairs I got excited for what I was able to accomplish today.  Then slowly it started.

So one of the first signs that day was slowly unfolding was that I have forgotten to bring one of my notebooks with me today to work.  My Moleskine notebooks have become a big feature on my desk as of this last year.  I decided to keep a notebook handy with me at all times because I never know when an idea will strike or I head / read a great quote that is relevant to what I’m working on or thinking about these days.  So I made sure that I always have one with me.

When I discovered that I didn’t have it with me, I brushed it off like it was nothing.  But I knew in the back of my head it was.  Then I decided to grab another one of my Moleskine notebooks, this one was my calendar.  In that calendar notebook, I decided to keep a log of the places I went to during that particular day.  So for today’s entry, it was Starbucks and Caltrans.  However when I wrote Caltrans, little did I know that was where I would spend nearly 12 hours of my day working on a small but important project.  More on that a little later.

Now with my iPhone plugged into my computer, headphones plugged in my iPhone, and just about logged in my computer, I settled into work, with what I assumed at the time would be a busy but productive day.  The morning started normal, checked my e-mail, looked at twitter, did my Good Morning World message of the day which read;

“Good Morning World! Everyone has a story. YOU ARE YOUR AUTHOR. Don’t let others write your story. Instead create the story you want to live.”

From the tweet, I was upbeat and I was.

So now I slowly settled into work.  The first order of business for me was to do some sketches of what I had to get done today.  Along with the sketches I had to do some calculations.

Oh before I forget, here’s some background info on what I’m working on.  So I was tasked to analysis and design some drainage systems for the project that I’m working on.  It’s taken me awhile to get to this point because I was put on other parts of the project that at the time I thought was great but now only to discover that it seriously made my current task so much more difficult because I basically had to start from scratch, where as my co-workers had months to work on their systems.  But oh well, it hasn’t killed me yet.  At least I hope it doesn’t.  So now I’m tasked with completing the whole analysis and design of two drainage systems.  And of course these two drainage systems at the surface look easy but once you get into the details of the work, I soon find out that it is more involved that it should have and the time given to me to complete is a bit crazy.

Now I continue, with the sketches and calculations done for the first system done.  I begin my adventure with doing additional research to make sure that I’m doing my task correctly.  To be honest, this is the first time, that I have ever done such a task.

Oh the task, I forgot to tell you the task, the task I had to do was to draw up profile sheets for the drainage systems that I was assigned.

Conducting my research I find out that there wasn’t a manual to help with setting this thing up.  So I guess I had to do the old fashion way, which was for me, to look at a sample and mimic the sample and then apply my design to look like the sample.

Now I won’t bore you with the really minute details that lead to my 12 hour day.  Let’s just say that after working on it for hours, it turns out that there seriously was a lot of things that I didn’t expect during the design and I had to trouble shoot the problems as I went.  The biggest trouble shoot issue that I had to do today was that the scale of my drawing was off.  My drainage inlets and pipes that I designed didn’t line up to the right elevation and some of the things where just off.  So I spent a better half of my afternoon trying to figure those issues out.   Which unfortunately lead me to stay at work until 7pm.  So I worked today from 7am to 7pm.  And on top of that I had to bring home some of the work to double check my calcs and prepare for tomorrow’s mad dash to finish the design. So wish me luck.

Now i’m off to double check the calculations and work out some of the details so I can get this thing out quickly tomorrow.

Till next time.

-Oliver the Engineer.

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