I got to work this morning and found this on my desk:
Ductwork Layout in a building, color coded for clarity
Turns out I made this the day before. By the time I was finishing this, around hour 12, I wasn’t taking a bird’s-eye view of what I had done.
I got to work, saw it all laid out in front of me and thought it looked kinda neat. After all, it is kinda neat. My supervisor walked by this morning and said, “Ooooh, pretty”.
It’s ductwork. Pretty ductwork. Green and blue are supply ducts, Red is return and exhaust ducts.
The color coding helps me wrap my head around what is what. I’m retrofitting an existing building, and what I need to design depends on what is already there. It’s a lot to keep track of, color-coding helps me keep track of it. What you see above is one floor on one half of the building. It’s a big job. Sometimes it feels bigger than my mind.
I get sucked into this type of work. I can do it for hours on end.
It is soothing, in its own way. Each new duct I color in adds to my understanding. I assembled this puzzle in my mind throughout the day, adding piece after piece, until I understood how all the pieces fit together. I know what each piece does, and how the new pieces that I have been tasked with adding have to fit into this overall system.
Understanding calms me down. It helps me focus, and once I have understanding, I know how to proceed to complete the task.
Most problems have simple solutions, once you know what the problem is.
The tricky part, the part that may require days of coloring in ductwork, is fully understanding the problem.