1. What’s the purpose?
“What’s the purpose?” I sometimes hear that guy in my head ask. “Why post those doggerel-worthy drawings of yours?”
Aside from the fact that the question makes me feel ashamed, he does have a point. Just what is their purpose — especially since some of them are so lousy?
Here’s how I look at it: these are just sketches about which I make no claims other they the fact that I sketched them, and I often spent shockingly (and obviously) little time at it.
I tell the guy, “A man can doodle; skip ‘em if you don’t like ‘em.”
2. Pushing me aside
Yet, often my sketches do have a purpose.
I remember a time when I was new on a development team and I walked up to one of the old hands and asked him a question. He didn’t quite understand and muttered something about needing to draw it out, at which point I (almost in glee) dashed back to my desk to retrieve my notebook with a sketch.
When I sat back down, he seemed to be ignoring me, which was confusing.
“Here, I’ve got it drawn here,” I said, but he turned away from me, continuing to try to sketch on his own.
He didn’t want to see my circles and arrows. I felt invisible.
3. Fancy pipes
There was another time, when I shared a diagram to different effect.
A friend, with whom I hadn’t worked for a while came to my cubicle and asked if we could talk. We had a mini design meeting in which, among other things, I stood up at a pad of paper on an easel that just happened to be next to us and drew a diagram. There were boxes and arrows and little file-shaped shapes and my rendering of a sitting person stick figure.
“I miss your diagrams,” he said.
“Oh,” I said, “you should see my new way of drawing pipes!” And I showed him.
He laughed.