meaningless

Ecclesiastes 2: Toil Is Meaningless

17 So I hated life, because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me. All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the wind. 18 I hated all the things I had toiled for under the sun, because I must leave them to the one who comes after me. 19 And who knows whether he will be a wise man or a fool? Yet he will have control over all the work into which I have poured my effort and skill under the sun. This too is meaningless. 20 So my heart began to despair over all my toilsome labor under the sun. 21 For a man may do his work with wisdom, knowledge and skill, and then he must leave all he owns to someone who has not worked for it. This too is meaningless and a great misfortune. 22 What does a man get for all the toil and anxious striving with which he labors under the sun? 23 All his days his work is pain and grief; even at night his mind does not rest. This too is meaningless.

Being at work at 11pm on a Saturday night sure does make you think about how meaningful (or not) your work really is. As our big deadline approaches, I realize just how much needs to be done, and in the end, just how little control we have over what ends up happening to these buildings.

I'm nearing the (eep!) 6 month mark of being at my company. I'm an HVAC engineering consultant, meaning I design heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems for residential and commercial buildings that will be built sometime in the near future. Sounds cool? Really, it's not.

In the construction industry, there appear to be four phases of design:

1) Concept Design - this is where we fight with architects and wonder how they could possibly be so idiotic as to draw buildings that will either collapse, freeze, overheat, or otherwise not be fit for human habitation. But hey, it's just concept. Lots of wiggle room for sketching and resketching, approximating, moving rooms around, etc.

2) Schematic Design - still fighting with architects. It's almost as if they WANT buildings to fall down, so long as they look pretty. Starting to nail down floor plans and layouts, understanding sizing of rooms and shaft spaces, equipment requirements, etc. Still, nothing is hard-and-fast.

3) Design Development - Full floor plans, riser diagrams including calculations and specifications, equipment lists, etc. This is the real deal - this is where buildings rise and fall.

4) Construction Documents - These are what the contracters take to the site and build from. Every last detail is here, so that anyone should be able to read it and build it.

So for this project, my company's contract is through phase 3: DD. Meaning, after this week, we will hand over hundreds of drawings and specifications to the owners, who will then take them to another consultant to pick up and complete the final phase of CD development before the groundbreaking and start of real construction.

So conceivably, my team could be busting our butts working late every night for the last week - to hand off the project to someone who could decide they want to cut corners or totally go a different way or whatever. All this inane calculating I've done to figure out how to heat these buildings in the dead of Korean winters could be for nothing if someone just chooses not to use my calculations - and moreover, someone could take them, change them into something that's wrong, and then people could freeze in the winter.

What the heck...

This passage was a good reminder that a) it's not worth slaving your life away at a job you really don't like or believe in, and b) work for the sake of working is worthless.

The old saying goes, the perfect job is when you find what you love to do and get someone to pay you for doing it. I've got a fairly good grasp of what it is I love to do...and I suppose during the school year I even have people who are willing to pay me for doing it. Times like this I wonder if it'd be totally crazy to go full-time teaching/tutoring.

Ah, Ecclesiastes...so many nuggets of reality.