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Finding the .04′
Posted by MightyMoe on April 7, 2023 at 8:42 pmI was chatting with an old-timer (my age). He’s retired but can’t seem to give it up. So he’s doing a remote subdivision in a nearby state that he isn’t licensed in. There is another firm reviewing all his work and he got a call. The surveyor for that firm had concerns about his subdivision layout, his guys were finding errors.
I asked how much error in this subdivision was he finding.
.02′ to .05′.
I chuckled and said he must have been being sarcastic, the old-timer said no, the reviewer is deadly serious.
Dang!!!
We aren’t talking about numbers in the plat, but monuments on the ground, this land is empty, no towns nearby, only farmland.
That’s some serious measuring right there.
MightyMoe replied 1 year, 4 months ago 15 Members · 31 Replies -
31 Replies
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Old Timer needs to reply with the same seriousness and intensity, “My monuments are perfect. The error you are seeing is in your measurements, not my monuments. Your crews must be doing something wrong if they don’t hit my monuments perfectly.”
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Absoutely. Who died and gave only them the ability to play God?
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Then they had the age old argument about the C1/4, Old-timer found a monument that’s used in a couple of descriptions and a highway. It’s almost perfect N-S, but 8′ E-W, imagine how that conversation went. 🙂
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0.04′ is alot in Downtown Los Angeles, but in Downtown LA, (Lower Arkansas) it’s a wash.
N
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He needs to ask them what their secret is to producing completely error free measurements.
Willy -
hell I’m working on a plat from 1924 and all the distances to the 10th and all the directions are only to the minute.
I’d like to see how they handle that deal.
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He’s retired but can’t seem to give it up. So he’s doing a remote subdivision in a nearby state that he isn’t licensed in.
And people wonder why surveying is in trouble…
Everyone like this person is the reason we are in trouble.
Not Gen Z. Not Gen Y. Not Gen X, etc. “Old-timers”.
So, “old-timers”… How does it feel to be the ones ruining the profession you claim to love?
And people are worried about 0.04’…?
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So, “old-timers”… How does it feel to be the ones ruining the profession you claim to love?
*WARNING* possible hijack alert.
This reminds me of a conversation my old man had recently with a local surveyor up in the UP of the Great Lakes State (incidentally one of the towns where both my old man and I got our degrees in surveying…) where said local surveyor bemoaned the idea of more licensed surveyors in the area. There’s already enough licensed guys around here- if there’s any more we won’t have any work!
Textbook definition of ‘!@#$ you, I got mine’ if you ask me. What happens when all those older guys retire or (let’s be honest) die off?
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In my area, we are all so busy, we don’t have time to waste trying to train anyone. Someday, when things slow down, and we have all the current money setting around waiting to be spent, maybe we can exercise that luxury. We are not an area one would call a “growth” location. Thus, no one thinks to join us.
Our county seat town has been home to one or more dentists since the creation of the town. The current dentist is retiring and making no effort to find someone to purchase the location, equipment, customer base, etc. A prime opportunity for someone who wants a customer base that will keep them just busy enough to raise a family with little competition.
HINT
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Takes me back to my very first job transitioning from framing homes to surveying in the early 90s. Talked one of the local surveyors into hiring me on and he was at the gun and I was setting a corner in a new subdivision. The corner fell in a really swampy area and it was like standing on a water bed. Every time I shifted my weight the ground moved half a foot and the pin was might as well have been set in Jello. Over and over he was trying to dial that pin to within .03’ and it was impossible. He finally explodes screaming expletives and storms over in a rage, and promptly sinks to his knees losing his shoes. I probably shouldn’t have laughed quite so hard because it did nothing to improve his mood, but it certainly improved mine.
Willy -
In my area, we are all so busy, we don’t have time to waste trying to train anyone. Someday, when things slow down, and we have all the current money setting around waiting to be spent, maybe we can exercise that luxury.
HA Yeah right.
I guarantee the day things slow down the new excuse is gonna be “We don’t have the income to train anyone right now”.
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Eh, it’s as simple as ensuring rates are high enough to attract top talent and pay them well, as well as train them.
Other professions, and even trades and service sector, train their people.
The plumbing crew that pipe-burst 40 feet of sewer line in our backyard, and the HVAC crew that installed our heat pumps each had an extra crew member-trainee on board, and from what I understood that was SOP. For the same time spent doing each job, a 2-person survey crew would have cost about 50-70% of what I paid.
They figured out how to make it work, surely we can too.
“…people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” -Neil Postman -
My 2 oldest kids have both had to hire Plumbing and HVAC companies and have purchased 5 homes between them. They’ve never had a property survey. Plumbing plugs and heat and air stop working even when interest rates rise. Normally real estate sales slow down and so does the demand for surveys.
I wonder how much training those Plumbing and HVAC employees get in the office.
I’m not suggesting we should not provide training, I am suggesting that with many firms being larger today it is unrealistic to expect to receive mentoring in the field and the office. Before we had cell phones and smart phones field crews made decisions instead of being micro managed by the office.
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hell I’m working on a plat from 1924 and all the distances to the 10th and all the directions are only to the minute.
I’d like to see how they handle that deal.
…they would add the zero to the end of the dimension and two zeros for seconds, then everything not perfect would be a MAJOR error in their book…
My $0.02 about expert measurers (slightly jaded opinion against those that call themselves surveyors and pull s%#t like not honoring a monument that is less than 0.50′ from their calculated monument) rant for the morning is over (for now)…..
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All one has to do is follow one’s own survey to find out one is not repeatable on the 2 or 3 hundredth level.
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I wonder how much training those Plumbing and HVAC employees get in the office.
Regardless of whether they get training when there’s a slowdown, I would say it’s significant that they are getting training when there’s plenty of work, while surveyors are not. A chunk of my HVAC and plumbing bills went to training an extra person on the crews. Can we not do the same?
I’m not suggesting we should not provide training, I am suggesting that with many firms being larger today it is unrealistic to expect to receive mentoring in the field and the office. Before we had cell phones and smart phones field crews made decisions instead of being micro managed by the office.
Before one can make decisions, one has to learn how they are made, what the results might/will be, and why one decision might be better than another. That takes training and mentorship. Micromanaging is not the result of cell phones – and I saw a lot of crap decisions that could have been prevented with a simple call to the office. Micromanaging stems from having a manager that does not trust staff to get it right. Sometimes that mistrust is justified, other times it’s not.
The way to fix that is not just to train and mentor, but hire folks who are open to being trained and mentored. That last part is hard for a lot of surveyors.
I guess my question – to everyone – is this: if we should not expect mentorship, then (a) where are the new hires going to learn, (b) how would a manager NOT be expected to micromanage totally untrained and inexperienced staff, particularly when it’s their stamp and liability on the line, and (c) why would anyone choose us over a trade?
“…people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” -Neil Postman
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