Four tribes or none?

- My current CNC assignment involves using a Very Bad Program to do very sloppy dimensioning for no good reason. I asked a classmate how to force the program to do it better and was told "this is the right way." I told him no, it's not, this is the sort of thing that gets drawings rejected and was challenged, aggressively, "how do you know?" I explained that the exemplar drawings framed on the wall in the CAD lab upstairs were done, in part, by me and that by the time he had been born I'd been drafting for about ten years. This was met with a sullen "well, this is the way we do it" which has been largely my experience among the machinists; there is folklore, engineers are evil wizards that are not to be questioned and the assignments I get are generally not drawn for clarity, they're drawn for confusion on the basis that the evil wizards are out to get you. This has tried my patience to the point of threatening to drop out. There's nothing worse than being forced to use bad tools because I said so.

- My jewelry assignment came out looking like shit because cheap enamel on copper looks like ass but when you spend several hours on something you call it a "happy accident." I had to do a presentation on a jeweler that inspires me and settled on Ludwig Oechslin but there was resistance when I explained that watch parts need precision to the ten thousandth in some cases and generally run in fluid bearings with half a thousandth tolerance. In order for the enamel to not look like ass, I have to do a lot of things that are not possible in the current environment because "happy accidents" are pretty much where an instruction lab lives.

- I got into a pissing match with a fellow watchmaker who was, without all the inside baseball, insisting that a common brand name part is officially called by the opposing brand name. That's clearly the way he learned it, and as with all things horological his knowledge is tribal, learned by rote and unchallenged. But it's the equivalent of walking into a Ford dealership and commenting about all the Chryslers they have sitting around. The fact that there are only a handful of places you can learn this stuff but lots of people practicing who haven't only serves to drive up the tribal closed-mindedness.

- We visited a heat treating lab Friday. They had lots of cool tests that brought me back to my glory days in engineering; yet when I asked technical details it revealed that theirs was a pragmatic knowledge divorced from the theory and that my questions about theory were resented.

IT'S SO DUMB. Everybody knows their one thing, and they know it well, and they know it exactly this way and if you step out, you're an infidel. And it doesn't fucking matter that you've taken ten credits on steel and five credits on heat treating. And it doesn't fucking matter that you're studying how to heat treat steel in two different fucking programs, when you ask questions that reveal you might understand what's being said and are curious about something not said you're the fucking auslander.

I'm home sick today. I'm not sick; the kid is sick. I'm in a program that marks me down for attendance and takes a third of my points away for being late because they're training people to punch a clock. I'm in another program that doesn't even make it clear what you're being graded on because the pragmatic knowledge dispensed is along the lines of "how to make your stuff stand out on Etsy." I asked a vendor for his price on an esoteric piece of software that makes it easier to hand-code G-code, the 60-year-old plaintext language that runs CNC. I was told, by the vendor, that in a well-run lab you never need to hand-code G-code therefore I shouldn't buy their software. Then we had to make a part on the new lathe in the shop and when we asked the vendor how to make the Very Bad Program perform a sub-spindle handover we were told "you hand code it."

Someone asked me how people "traditionally" become watch designers. I told them that "traditionally" your parents were watchmakers and so were you and you started making parts or that "traditionally" you're a rich person with ideas and you find some people to make your shit so you can sell it to your rich friends. I recognize that I'm pretty non-traditional but a lot of that is likely because I sit at the crossroads of four disciplines that are tribal in the extreme, that protect their folklore jealously, and that hold all other disciplines to be antagonistic.

I wonder how many industries could be revolutionized just by forcing people out of their comfort zones.