Typical Day
Carl Tographer's day usually starts at 7:30AM with a cup of very strong Earl Grey tea and some bacon. He really likes both of them, and thinking about his day job as a cartographer sometimes gets him down. It's not what he thought it'd be when he was a kid. No trekking through misty mountains or leading a team on a mapping expedition of Antarctica.
He stopped thinking that life as a cartographer would be like that a long time ago, of course. He's a grown man in his mid-thirties and he knows what Google Maps is all about. But in his heart of hearts, Carl is an old romantic. He just wants to explore new places, draw elegant maps, write quirky accounts of the new and exotic flora that he's finding in remote—
"Carl! You're going to be late!"
Carl snaps back to reality and sees that his wife, Catherine, is passing him his car keys and lunch. Whoops. He has a very unfortunate habit of daydreaming that tends to get him in trouble.
He grabs his lunch, keys, and coat, and just manages to thank Catherine for jolting him back to reality before they both have to leave. Catherine hops into her car and heads towards her downtown office; Carl gets into his car and heads for Grapher & Son's Surveyors.
Because he left the house at 8:40AM, Carl squeaks into work at 9:10AM—ten minutes late. He makes it to his desk before he's caught and fires up his computer so he can continue to tidy up the digital map he's been working on of the new neighborhood. The neighborhood isn't complete, but the streets are all planned out, so Carl can get started.
Carl has never liked sitting still. He works for two hours, then starts to feel fidgety. Luckily, his boss Geoff—the "Son's" part of "Grapher & Son's"—interrupts him.
"Hey, Carl. You busy?"
"Just cleaning up the map of that new subdivision."
"Oh, good." Geoff nods. "Listen, they've decided they want to expand that subdivision a bit. We need to go out and survey it this afternoon, okay?"
Yes. Time away from the computer. It isn't that Carl hates technology, it's just that he'd rather be outside.
Geoff leaves and Carl works until noon, when he takes a half-hour lunch break. Then, everyone at work gathers up their coats, notebooks, and tablets and they all head out to check out the land that the builders want to expand onto. It's a relatively flat expanse, with a bit of marshy area that will have to either be skirted around or drained. The good workers of Grapher & Son's bustle around, snapping pictures and taking measurements that'll be used to help plan the expansion.
They finish around 3:00PM, and then it's another twenty minutes to get back to the office. Carl is supposed to get back to the map that he's working on—he can just add on the extension once it's been plotted—but his old tendency to daydream gets the better of him.
Soon, he's not in his office, working on the computer—he's sitting at a writing desk in a monastery on the outskirts of the known world, dipping a quill pen into a pot of homemade ink and drawing an intricate and seamless outline of the country. After a moment of thought, he flicks the quill across the parchment, detailing the ragged road that connects the monastery to the town. The road, of course, is very dangerous, as it passes through a dark forest filled with wolves and ruthless bandits that will—
"Carl! What are you daydreaming about? Get back to work!"
Carl jerks in his chair and looks around. Geoff is hanging around the doorframe, and he looks mighty irritated that he's caught Carl drifting off—again.
"Sorry, Mr. Grapher," he mumbles, wondering if there's some way to convince his boss that he was just thinking about whether a street name was correct or not.
Geoff heaves a sigh. "Whatever, just don't let it happen again. You're a good cartographer, Carl, but at this rate..." he doesn't finish the sentence, but Carl knows what Geoff is implying. If he doesn't get his act together, he's going to have to kiss his current map—and every other map he might make in the future for Grapher & Son's—goodbye.
"Sorry, sir, just got distracted. Won't happen again." he says, and turns back to his work. Geoff mutters something and goes to find another hapless daydreamer to yell at.
Carl works hard for the rest of the day, so hard that by 5:00PM, he's almost caught up on the time he lost while he was at the monastery with his quill and ink. He doesn't want to lose this job. Yes, he has a tendency to drift off when he's in front of a computer, but overall, he likes working at Grapher and Son's. The computer stuff might be boring, but going out to a field to survey it, or spending hours photographing land in order to plot a new highway, is pretty cool.
It's a half-hour drive back home. Carl spends it listening to the classical music radio station and thinking about how he could make his drive shorter by building a connecting street between the two local highways.
A meal of baked spaghetti and a glass of decent merlot are waiting for him at home, along with Catherine (who is extremely happy because she closed a big deal) and Junior, their sheltie sheepdog. After dinner, Catherine settles down to watch her favorite show while Carl retreats to his home office for his favorite part of the day: fantasy mapmaking.
Carl loves to spend his spare time reading, but when the book is finished and he has a firm grasp of the world inside the novel, his favorite hobby is to draw maps for the book.
Carl sits down at his mahogany desk and pulls up his comfortable chair. From the bookshelf over his head, he retrieves his latest read, a fantasy novel about two orphans and a dark queen. It was a great book, but now that it's done, it's time to map out the fantasy world.
He starts with a generalized map of the land. Then, he adds any cities or important places the characters visited, pens some details and a legend, and finally plots the character's journey in red ink. Oftentimes, he makes maps of individual cities in the book as well.
So, in a way, Carl thinks, his daydreams of the scholarly penning of maps wasn't unreachable—he completes a map of some sort nearly every night. And not some wimpy child's map, either. He spent a fortune on a professional quill set, multiple colors of ink, and large leathery sheets of paper to recreate his somewhat fantastical view of what cartography should be. It's totally worth it to him, though.