I started the actual job I was trying to avoid and found it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought. It consisted of taking acetate and vellum engineering drawings, putting them through a giant scanner, organizing the files, and then boxing the drawings for storage at Iron Mountain for eternity. I was able to convince my boss to let me have a single earphone in and I went through the day jollily listening to a family of TWiT podcasts. The real fun part was the response I got from the CAD group that creates the 3D designs for new products. I was in a different world:
-A drawing was rejected for not including the warning ‘remove all sharp edges and burrs’. Â The drawing was for a circular piece of foam cushion that had both no edges and could not physically have burrs.
-There was a constant whoosh from an air vent that sounded like you were in a wind tunnel. I wasn’t much affected as I had headphones on. One CAD guy said it sounded like it was playing a tune a throughout the day whistled arguably the world’s least connected set of tunes, none of which had any sound bearing close to the air whoosh.
-One of the CAD guys was planning a rebellion for not being allowed to have a radio claiming that the place sounded “like a fucking church”. Case and point: He rebooted his computer and the Windows boot music was shushed by his coworkers.
-Some of the drawings were pretty old. In fact, I think I saw a CAD drawing for a horseless carriage and the wheel.