Clearance....

For some people clearance means a good deal on shoes.  For others, the appropriate background checks and paperwork to access the information they need.  For me, it means getting a drawing "clearance" to be given to someone else outside of my place of work to have it fabbed or whatever.

Now, the system is really pretty simple.  You have to include a bunch of details in your drawing and in the paperwork associated with your drawing that mean something to someone higher-up who has to deal with a wide assortment of various drawings and because the various classes of drawings are so different, treat each one very differently.  I think one of those persons is named Jose (for the purposes of this blog we'll call him Jose, anyway, it's a good name for a good guy), because that is the name associated with all my drawings that get repeatedly rejected from the system.  Unfortunately for me, those details are peripheral to my work and ALWAYS the exact same, and you all know how well I deal with monotonous details that appear to me to be minute.

Anyway, I always find a way to screw it up, and Jose has to reject my work 85% of the time.  At first I'd get the rejection e-mails and be confused.  The e-mail has no details as to why the drawing was rejected.  I'd change a few things, submit again, and get rejected again.   Then I'd get frustrated and scream, "KHHAAAANN" at the computer every morning.  Then I realized most of my rejections were associated with the name "Jose," and my scream became, well, you know.

Then one day I was looking at the system a little more closely and realized there's an unobtrusive button on one of the pages that lets you see comments as to why your drawing was rejected.  It's an oddly-named button for this sort of thing, so it's easy to see why I might miss it.  I finally found it, though, and saw that "Jose" had been making comments all along as to how I could modify the documents to make it possible for him to "clear" them through the system.

Suddenly, I had a paradigm shift.  I could see poor Jose opening his e-mail every morning to see that I'd sent him the third version of a sub-par drawing.  He'd been leaving me messages on how to do it right, and every time, without fail, I'd been sending him back a drawing with everything changed except for the one detail that he had been telling me I needed to change before he could clear my drawing.  If he's anything like me, he's been yelling my name in KHAN caps at his computer every morning.

I felt very bad.  And very stupid.  And suddenly very empathetic with Jose.  The man's been patiently putting up with my idiocy for months, when he should've tracked me down and yelled at me for making his life much harder than it needed to be.  Now, I double and triple-check all my drawings before putting them into the system.  Really, I should just break down and bring the man cookies for putting up with me all this time.  Jose is a saint!