Introduction to the Reference Manual > Work procedure > The moral story about Calvin Bigshot and Nicholas Planner

Calvin Bigshot is not going to make his career very far, that we can be sure of. How will he proceed? He starts his career on cadett ELSA with a huge project that has a tight deadline. He has not calculated any time for learning the program. Instead he starts to work on the project immediately and because of the tight deadline there is no room for experiments.

First, this unfortunate designer draws the whole project containing a couple of hundred drawing sheets. Then Calvin feels satisfied with his work, and for the first time he checks the OnLine Protocol. After that he goes into a massive depression and has to be treated with psychopharmacological drugs. When he investigates the protocol and realise that there are maybe 10 – 50 serious errors per sheet, then – if not before – he realise that he has not been overly smart. To correct all those errors will take time, lots of time. The sad thing is that they are simple errors and the same errors over and over again. It would have been very easy to avoid the majority of them.

Nicholas Planner knows that all new technology has a certain threshold of knowledge. You have to learn the technology, so you can use it in a correct way. Nicholas starts with some simple examples. Then he tries a small project. When he feels that he masters those functions, he moves on to the big projects.

When Nicholas draws, he creates one or maybe even two sheets. Then he checks his OnLine Protocol. He corrects the errors, and learns not to do those errors again. Then he draws a couple of drawing sheets more and so on.

When Nicholas Planner is finished with his first huge project, corrected and ready, Calvin Bigshot is heaped under a pile of protocol printouts with an unimaginable number of errors. That is if he has not been institutionalised by then.

The moral of this story:

Check your OnLine Protocol regularly, preferably after each sheet you are done with.