After fourteen days of unemployment I'm working again. Whereas I recently worked for D now I work for T. T is a large civil engineering company here in Richmond - the office I work in downtown is less than twelve minutes away on a route that has little traffic.
I liked the office as soon as I got into it on Wednesday, when I attended the interview. It occupies three floors in a very large historic building downtown - but without being a part of the business area. The area the building occupies is bohemian: full of students, an Irish bar a couple of blocks away, an art gallery and fancy furniture store close by. Lots of attractive women wandering about - and much, much more rarely, the occasional attractive man as well. I noticed that most female college students attract me in England - and the same is true here.
Inside, the building is a maze. Lots of misshapen illogical corridors with doors leading into rooms beyond - all of which are clearly visible because the doors are glass, the corridor wall are a brilliant white and everything is strongly lit without the light being dazzling. And its completely silent. Very little talking about anything not immediately connected to work goes on, and for the most part everyone works in complete silence. Which is how I learned to do this job in the first place and how an office of that kind ought to be. This particular project doesn't demand much in the way of complex draughting skills: if you can split a line and manipulate vertices then you pretty much have everything you need. But even so it involves some actual drawing for a change, and very close attention to detail.
This isn't the first time I've used ArcESRI products - but it is the first time I've actually enjoyed using the interface, as well as finding the actual image on the screen to be satisfying. So I'm a GIS geek. Sue me.
I've worked with AutoCAD, SmallWorld, ArcFM and DRS - which is a system originally developed by the Ordnance Survey in the UK and is peculiar to that institution. DRS is by far the prettiest. Look at a monitor running images produced by the DRS software, and the maps look like different colored intestines and delicately partitioned organs on a jet-black background. The colors are jewel-like in intensity. You use a virtual draughting table and a puck with that one - which is something else I like about DRS.
GE's SmallWorld is the most baroque in the number of its editors, all available as mini-GUIs on screen, and the array of its capabilities. It's also the most demanding to use in terms of what the operator actually has to do. There's (or there was) an enormous amount to remember in order to use it efficiently. But it's also the most satisfying to work with in terms of the things it can do and the discretion the operator has to choose between different techniques. There is, or was, a level of individualism and personal expression involved.
The project I used SmallWorld on was also the most technically demanding I've been involved in, mapping the entirety of a large utility's network in every detail. This present job is much less demanding in that sense, but it still involves the creation of entities and representations in what is essentially a map. What I do isn't cartography in the sense that Mercator understood the word, but it is a form of mapping.
I'm working on a project updating work carried out to create a digital record of every road center line in Virginia. Roads change a lot. New roads appear, and sometimes old roads are no longer used. But center lines don't constitute a route map and aren't represented in the same way that most maps represent roads. You'd be hard pressed to recognise it for what it is, without being told. It makes the screens around the room look technically sophisticated and impressive - at least to me.
The floor I work on is one large, well-lit room, dived up into six assymetrically shaped pods, each holding two workstations. There's at least eight and possibly ten in the room, besides the secretary at her desk by the glass doors. My podmate is E. She's perhaps twenty-two or twenty-three, but seems considerably younger. Her face is very alert and intelligent, her gaze direct though a little diffident. She's happy to talk about something definite - books, movies etc., and can talk intelligently - but won't chitchat. And she's reed thin, has breasts the size of wren's eggs, and hips as straight as a boy's. She's also fond of semi-goth-y outfits and not-quite-platform boots that reach to her knees. Needless to say, I'm very happy to have made her acquaintance.
E sits to my right and behind me. To my left is Wy. He's a former coastguard and very helpful. He has massive sand coloured eyebrows, pale blue eyes and a nose long and sharp enough to open letters with. He reminds me of a younger, saner version of Chris-who-hummed-methodist-hymns-while-his-eye-twitched. Chris was my supervisor on a job in England. He once emailed me to tell me my head was leaking. He sat opposite me and was distracted from his humming of hymns by the volume I had the Walkman playing at.
So far I like the job. So far it's a huge improvement over the last one. We'll see.