814 pages
That’s a lot of pages, only about 230 were drawings and the rest are specifications and general paperwork that goes along with a design package. I was responsible directly and indirectly for about 200 of the drawings and literally had my hands on every single drawing in the package because as we found out that the .pdf files that we sent out were not to scale I went back and cleaned some of the Electrical and Electronic Security Sytems drawings. Right now I’m starting to work on a Design Cost Analysis for some road upgrades out at Pueblo and in doing that I’m going back and looking at the phases that this design went through. I need to know how many hours I spent working on each individual iteration of the design so that I can come up with a good guess as to how long this other design is going to take.
It’s pretty neat to look back and see how things progressed, this Design started at 35% as one package with 65 sheets in it. If finished with three packages and 230 sheets, not including specs. I remember when I was younger looking at design packages and thinking that I’d never be able to do something like that. But I’ve learned over the course of this design that it’s really not that hard, you just have to do a little at a time adding details and notes and cross-sections and profiles until before you know it you have a design that is actually constructable. What’s neat to me is that the life of a design is much life the life of a person, you start out with nothing and you slowly start building a little at a time until 27 years later you have a very complex individual that’s composed of a lot more than 814 pages. From one cell you have a mountain of information, memories and experiences stored in you.
Anyway, I just think that’s pretty cool.