When you design an entire retail development (or strip mall if you're feeling uncharitable), you have to deal with several physical buildings that are part of one master plan. Each one has its own foundation and needs its own grading, code calculations, utilities hookups, and so on. Call the whole shebang a building pad. If you're dealing with a big project with lots of building pads in it, you may as well split it up and treat each pad as a separate project. Give each pad to a different person to handle on their own, and it'll be much less confusing than one person trying to remember which one is which. We've got one of those going on right now.
Yesterday, the taller project manager made $25 on the office Superbowl betting pool and graciously decided to treat everyone to lunch. What, he mused, could you get for $25 in the neighborhood to feed an entire office? Aha! Thai food! "What," he asked the other architects, "do you guys think of Pad Thai noodles?"
The Southern architect looked up wearily from her CAD drawings. "Pad Five noodles?"
The Mexican architect's head snapped up. "There are noodles in Pad Five?" she asked. "Are they putting noodles in Pad Two also?"
"Pad Two noodles?" asked the interior designer, who'd only just joined in the conversation. "What?"
"Ohhhhh," I said from the front of the office. "Tattoo noodles. It makes perfect sense."
The office clown walked by my desk and nodded. "Pad Two Pad Two tattoo Pad Two tattoo," he said helpfully.
"It's just like the Tower of Babel in here," sighed the taller project manager, ordering Pad Thai noodles anyway.
Posted by dianna at February 8, 2005 10:30 AM