Without going into too many specifics, I coordinate the visual layout of a certain retail store, and tomorrow I get to deploy yet another fancy new toy for people to drool over. Now one would think that this would not be a difficult thing, but the company I work for is extremely picky about appearances and as such there are certain high standards to which I must adhere to.
I usually do, but in one particular area I tend to take their standards and chuck them out the nearest window. See, my store is laid out in a unique way in respect to the rest of the company, so as such the measurements they give us for how they want things almost NEVER work in my store.
For the past few years I've taken the approach to this problem as I've been taught via experience as a theater crew coordinator, as a geology student, and as a watcher of the original Star Trek series (good ol Scotty, makin shit up as he goes along...); I eyeball it.
If I set something down, step back five paces, and say "It looks good," then damnit, it looks good. I hate tape measures.
I'm a big follower of environmental measurements, which means I measure things with what I have on hand and not always with what tools I have available. For example, I know that on average 10 paces = 21 feet for me, my outstretched arms from are 65 inches from palm to palm, and it's just about 2 inches when measured across the tips of my index, middle and ring fingers.
This whole bit where "Space each device approximately 17" from each other" don't work for me.
So that brings me to my current dilemma. Ordinarily I'd just do my measurements and get the job done nice and quick, but for the past few months I've been relegated to a sort of 'manager' role, where I oversee people doing the work I used to do, and am not really allowed to do the work myself. Something about developing new job skills... gah.
Now I don't mind having minions, I'm just as lazy as anyone else. It's that now I have to translate the measurements I do in my head to measurements people can use. Annoyance ensures!
But today! Today I had a plan! I'd work out the measurements ahead of time and just write them down for my minions, that way I'd not have to do the measurements tomorrow and then spend time translating. Perfect way to burn the last few hours of my shift.
So I got their measurements (wrong, as usual), and measured out what I had to work with. Then i took it over to a computer and graphed it out, converting the 1/1 measurements into a scale that was workable on screen. I went and measured out the devices I was setting up and all sorts of other little tiny measurements that I normally just guess at and put them all down into the formula.
Bout halfway through this I was ready to throw the computer out the window.
Little known fact : I failed every math course I've taken since 7th grade.
I dearly wanted to just ignore these silly measurements and take a random fixture and use that as my measuring template, but I was so far along in the calculating that I might as well have finished it.
Eventually I derived the solution. A nice and even number that even the most mathmatically challenged could understand! Yes, I too understood it.
11 inches.
That number sounded far too familiar.
I quickly snatched up the acrylic fixture that I normally use for my spacing when setting up such devices. Back then I figured that if I used something that was precision made for us, it'd be pretty good as a measuring tool.
It is precisely 11 inches.
So, if I had just skipped the whole math thing and used what I normally would have just guessed to use as a decent measurement, it would have been the same result.
I despise math.
