Hot take: I just realized I've been using the wrong line weight for section views for my entire 8-year career after a client's engineer circled it in red.

He wrote 'this looks like a sketch' on the print and now I'm questioning everything I learned in my first job at that small firm in Phoenix, so has anyone else had a basic standard they got wrong for way too long?

3 comments

3 Comments

graceblack1mo ago

My buddy at his last firm had a whole department using the wrong scale for site plans for like five years. They were taught to do it one way by a senior guy who retired, and it just became the office standard. A city reviewer finally flagged it on a big permit set, and they had to go back and fix years of archived drawings. It was a mess that started with one person being wrong and nobody ever questioning it.

oliver_morgan1mo ago

That bit about the wrong scale becoming the office standard for years is so real. It's like when you learn a shortcut on a computer program wrong and then teach it to a new hire, and suddenly the whole team is doing it the weird way. I see it with cooking recipes, like my family's meatloaf had a totally unnecessary step for two generations because my grandma misread a cookbook once. Once a method gets baked in, it just becomes the truth.

-1

parkera221mo ago

My aunt's pumpkin pie recipe called for evaporated milk for decades. Turns out the original card just said "milk" and she added the evaporated part herself. We only found out when my cousin tried to make it from an old community cookbook. It still tasted fine, but it was never actually the right recipe.