I am not a drafter

A couple months ago we laid off our only structural drafter. Now granted the guy had some issues, some of you know them and I'm just going to leave it at that, but to be honest, the guy used to run the friggin' the structural drafting department at his previous jobs, so regardless of his personal life the dude was f*cking money on drafting.

So as a result of his departure, the engineering department now has no dedicated drafter. I and my structural boss now have to tap people in the architectural drafting department if we want anything done. This means that we have someone who can draw, but who does not know the language we are talking. For example, a structural drafter will know how to draw something if we just call it out: "can you make this a moment connection," "can you add another angle here and weld it using a fillet weld" or more importantly and the number one thing we need done "can you stretch this out a few feet." So now that we have someone who doesn't understand our language drawing up what we need, I now have to spend extra time either drafting things myself or sketching out what I mean and going through a mini training session.

Now, don't get me wrong, I enjoy teaching people. I love that the drafter's are beginning to understand our language and aren't so reticent when I tap them for help with drafting. However, when you add a deadline that I need to fulfill to the mix, we have ourselves a problem when I'm trying to teach someone at the same time. Therefore, I've been taking the structural drafting reins.

I engineered and drafted for 3 years at the first company I worked for and I'm very happy to still have the skills enough to actually draft and help us out. However, I am not a drafter. Therefore, problems will arise because I'm not familiar with our drafting styles at this firm and our architect has expectations that he and our client's like to like to meet. Hence, there are going to be some problems and errors that will arise when you have a switchhitter at the drafting bat.

I had a mini blow up at both our architect and our COO to let them know that I can't be taking the reins for much longer. If we start to pick up again project wise, we will need to look for a structural drafter or steal someone from the architectural department, permanently. I can't be relied on for the structural drafting alone, I have plenty of engineering tasks at hand and will so in the future.

So after my discussion (yes, I'm using the term as if talking to my child, "no, mommy and daddy are having a 'discussion,' we're not fighting") everyone now knows my view on things. And then afterwards I offered everyone nice stinky cheese as a peace offering. :-) (stinky = good, that's my nickname)

I'm glad I finally said it, but also a part of me worries that maybe I should just keep my mouth shut. However, my structural boss and myself are getting fed up about things and know that in time this will be a HUGE problem if we have deadlines to meet and we can't get things drawn in time. And I'm not going to be doing two jobs and only getting paid for one, I'm not that nice and I don't have a "Welcome" mat as a shirt.

So I'm happy I said it so that I can vent to the proper person, all my cards are on the table and it seems like it was the right thing to do. I just hope no one is secretly like "oh my god, I hate that engineer" or "she is overstepping her bounds, she shouldn't be questioning that." But to be honest, I've always been this way, my boss hired me as such, so it shouldn't be a problem. I do worry though which is what I do best, and I worry that maybe I did overstep my bounds. However, I went to the right person to vent my issue and it was within ear shot of my big boss and nothing bad happened. Later on my big boss gave me a problem to solve about a garage addition we were doing and everything seemed OK.