Monkey See, Monkey Do

I have spent the last two weeks learning the dreaded program autocad.
For those of you unfamiliar with the term "cad monkey", it is a description for the work that many would-be architects end up doing... sitting in front of a computer for eight hours a day, entering someone else's design into a computer... the kind of work that scares the shit out of young creative people, and probably sounds to most sane people like a pretty miserable way to spend 40 to 80 hours a week.
So many of us have an irrational fear of cad. We don't want to know it; we don't want to be good at it, because when you are good at something like that, your boss wants you to stay there forever.
However, cad is unavoidable, and not that bad I am finding out. It is the primary means of communication for architects today.
I often wonder if I should have been born eighty years ago when drafts people actually used a pencil, paper and parallel. As extreme as my irrational fear of cad is, to the same extreme is my love of hand drafting- not just sketching, but making precise, detailed drawings manually.
During my stint as an AmeriCorps member, I had a co-corps friend who used to wear to work one of my favorite t-shirts ever- picture a silk-screened image of Henry Ford emblazoned on the front, his proud mug inside a red circle that boldly crossed him out. When I first saw it I had to ask my friend who it was on his shirt, and when he told me I had to ask why this man, whom I was taught since grade school was a great American hero, was given the null. My friend described for me his experience working in the Honda factory in Ohio, and I understood: Ford may have improved factory efficiency with the invention of the assembly line, but he managed to seriously change this workplace for the worse. Where once craftspeople were paid to craft, now lever-pullers and button-pushers were paid much less to repeat these mundane tasks ad nauseum and beyond. What kind of way is that to spend your life? Is it worth the automobiles and appliances that these methods of mass production have granted us access to, for us to resign craft to machines and spend our lives performing repetitive and mind numbing tasks?
This is precisely the predicament of modern living as I see it, and it makes me want to turn and run away, or become a lounge singer at some dive somewhere, or teach, or go to massage school, or... anything that I can have some pride in because it is my own, anything that allows me real contact with real people, real things in this real world- anything but living inside a 17 inch digital rectangle.
I want to hope it is not so bad. I only have seven weeks left of school, and then I work in an office until I retire or die, or perhaps I will die the day I walk in the door of my first real architecture job.
But for now I still work for yours truly; these hours and minutes are mine, this project is mine. What happens next I dont know, but thoughts of it, whatever it is, are much more present in my mind right now than anything I could design.