Hot take: some clients treat drawings like they're ordering from a menu at Denny's

Last Tuesday I had a guy walk into my shop and point at a set of plans I spent 10 hours on. He said "can you just rotate this wall 15 degrees and add a window here?" like it was flipping a pancake. I told him that changes the whole load path and now we're redoing the foundation layout. He looked at me like I had three heads. Anyone else get clients who think drafting is just pushing buttons?

2 comments

2 Comments

davis.emma20d ago

Admit I used to be one of those people who thought drafting was basically just clicking stuff in AutoCAD. Then I actually tried learning the structural side of things and realized how much goes into even a simple wall rotation. It's like people see the software and assume it's magic that auto-corrects everything. Now I get why my contractor friends used to roll their eyes at me.

nancy_miller20d ago

My husband's a mechanic and he says the same thing about people who think fixing cars is just plugging in a diagnostic tool. There's this whole mindset now where people see the interface and think that's the whole job, like what's underneath doesn't matter. I noticed it with my neighbor too, he bought a fancy 3D printer and got mad when the prints kept failing, kept saying the software should just figure it out. It's like we forgot there's actual engineering behind all this stuff, not just buttons to push.