04-01-2026, 10:41 PM
Our drafting instructor was ex-military - not sure if he was a drill sergeant or not - but he put the fear into a lot of kids. He used to give me a hard time because of the Irish name and would make comments how I'd down a glass of whiskey every day after school or I just had a shot after lunch. I got an A in his class too, but one interaction was great. We're doing isometric blueprints and we had our T-squares and two triangles to make sure we're drawing the angles correctly. Lining up the triangles was a giant pain in the butt so I just used my one straight edge and eye-balled the entire thing. He comes over and sees what I'm doing and he nearly had a stroke/heart-attack with his beat red face and the steam coming out of his ears. Then the shouting and trash bin throwing started up. Well, all eyes are on me now. He screams at me about what I'm doing and how the measurements and angles needed to be exact and blah blah blah... I tell him I'm just eye-balling it and it looks pretty accurate. He proceeds to bust out his compass and scale and pushes me out of the chair and he begins measuring everything. To his credit, he does admit when he's wrong and calms down and he says, everything is exact, although I'd still like you to use the T-square, triangles and ruler when doing the classwork. He walks back to his desk and says he'll have a bottle of whiskey in my name when he gets home. From that moment on, I was his best student and he definitely treated me a lot better than everyone else...