The third of the third

It's 11am and I have just sat down with a cup of coffee to read e-mail (the architects are away in deepest Bavaria meeting the town council), and the first on the list was from U (the architect): an abusive and insulting cry of rage that "nothing works" - but of course without mentioning any specifics of what might be wrong. I was in the office all day while these drawings were being printed out; U looked at them at the time - she plotted them herself - and had there really been any errors, they could have been corrected there and then had she mentioned them. She further ranted about my being "away" and that this was unacceptable. It's true, I was not in the office: she wrote the mail at 23:30, having herself told me at 19:30 to go home.

I guess that the problem is not in the submission drawings, but in the rough-cut "next stage" drawings: quite simply increased in scale from 1:100 (a person is as large as your thumbnail) to 1:50 (a person is as large as your thumb) and given a new border, but without new or improved content. These were done at her command in the last hour before I went home, and were explicitly desired as prototypes to demonstrate how the view might look on paper. (These are huge drawings, up to 180*94cm.) U saw them as rough prints and approved them. I presume now that she is angry and disappointed because this hour of work did not bring the six (!) drawings up to the same quality as the ground floor plan - which took a week of work to complete. I find this to be unrealistic and unreasonable, but what do I know? I'm only the flunky.

This is typical of U's attitude in the office: everything that goes wrong is entirely my fault. Example: a bad (non-workable) detail which she suggested, was drawn into the plans by myself. Now that she sees that the detail is bad, there is "a problem in my drawings". Example: a piece of Windows software refuses to use the printer which we configure in the Print Options page, but will only use the printer that was default at the time it was installed. "You must have done something wrong."

I shall have to start looking for other sources of income, because the situation is clearly not going to change. Poor G; I would feel guilty about leaving him in the lurch, and would miss working with him, but he made his bed and must lie in it.

I had actually set out to write a happy piece about snow (still falling in March!) and the holiday spirit, and seeing a wonderful film with Slim, but this has seriously spoiled my mood.

[Updated after midnight] I have just indulged for the first time in a group sit (synchronized meditation around the world) and very nice it was too. I smiled with my eyes closed, to think of all of us, all thinking of each other. And also came to terms with my image of myself as a warthog among butterflies: I imagined the scene from the point of view of a butterfly watching the warthog and saying to itself "look at him splashing in the mud, damn that must be fun".

I wanted to post this fragment of a conversation about the film (highly recommended by the way):

Slim: So why did Daniel run away from Lena, if he loved her?

Udge: Fear.

Slim: ... of failure?

Udge: No, rather fear of success. Fear of the changes that happiness might bring.

Slim: You're talking about yourself, right?