I don't know if I should put this in humor, but I thought of a story when I was working with the biggest bully I've worked with back in the day. Maybe others could tell some funny or bully-stories on this thread.
Anyway, I was the instrument-man back then and the time-period was the mid-eighties. The crew-chief seemed to always yell at me and I was intimidated by him. I hadn't learned yet how to deal with this kind of nasty (abusive) behavior. He, a another guy (a really good hard worker), and I were surveying on this incredibly steep hill. I think one of the steepest hillsides I ever had to climb. We hiked in, turned our angles and measured our distances and had to get down. I was using a Wild T-2 Theodolite and a clip-on edm (Leitz Red-2 I think it was called). We started down, I canned the wild and boxed the edm. The party-chief said he would carry the boxed edm and that I had to carry the tripod and instrument. I had the tripod over my shoulder and the wild in the can and no hands free. He had been yelling at me all day, and he told me I better not drop the equipment or I might as well walk home.
He (graciously) carried the boxed edm. I'm working my way down the hill with both hand hanging onto the tripod and the instrument, and he's doing the same with one free hand and the edm in the other. The rodman was scurrying down the hill with all the other equipment. When the party chief slipped on a rock, fell and dropped the edm (in the box). I stood up above him and watched that box roll-hit a rock bound up in a big arc, drop 10 feet, hit another rock and bounce its way all the way down that mountainside. If finally landed in a creek and started floating down the creek. I guess all the tension let go, and I couldn't stop laughing. I called the rodman up on the two-way radio and told him to get to the bridge and watch for the edm floating down the river. I was laughing while I said it. He got back on the radio and said um, tom are you shi**in' me about the edm? I was still laughing and said "no I'm dead serious." He didn't know if he should believe me or not, but started watching for the edm. He finally found it while the crew-chief and I worked our way down the hill. (It had been water-tight and floated but finally hung up on the bank).
The party chief seemed to be able to ride back to the office and not fire himself or walk home. And I'll be damned if that edm box wasn't so water-tight and well-padded that we took it out again and checked it against other good edms. It worked good and measured just fine.
Maybe not that funny, but it sure made me laugh. Often times these "bullies" find themselves making bigger blunders than they ever accuse others of doing. You just gotta watch what you say or it will come back and bite you.
I have other good stories about similar things happening to the same guy. Funny how if you don't stand up to them it doesn't matter how much they screw up, they'll keep on you as long as you let them.
I was using a T-2 and Red Mini back in the 80's.
I was careful and all but packed up the precious T-2
and then picked up both sets of equipment to pack out.
OOPS - Red Mini came flying out of the box onto a rock.
(Westchester/Putnam County NY)
I was a careful worker and all but as Zepplin says:
"It's no no no nobody's fault but your own"
I felt bad about that.
Good news: We got a new one 😉
Well it just made me laugh, too.
Licensed Land Surveyor
Finger Lakes Region, Upstate New York
Had a PC years ago that was totally convinced I and the rodman were the most worthless field help anybody could ever have. If we didn't split the range pole it was because I turned the angle wrong. If distance didn't fit it was our miserable chaining.
We were blessed (once) with a new chain. The PC carefully unrolled it to lay it out and put the leather thongs on the end. He "preached" at us the whole time about how we didn't deserve a new chain and we'd better take care of it somehow with all our gross incompetence...yadda..yadda..
Anyway, he had laid the chain flat in the ditch parallel to a blacktop road and tied the spanking new leather thongs to the end, properly. The job we were on was a hundred or so feet down the road from where all this was taking place. He picked up the 'smart' end of the chain and started walking toward the property we were surveying. As he was walking the dumb end of the chain snagged a weed.
In a huff he yanked on the chain real hard and the end jumped airborne and landed in the road...right in front of probably the only car to come by there that morning! The car never stopped. It wadded that new chain up and drug it about 300' down the road before it spit it out. The chain was broken in at least two places and bent hard in a number of others. I laughed so hard I think I wet my britches!
The PC was livid. He was trying real hard to make it somebody else's fault. He was so adamant that nobody else touch the new chain but him, it was impossible to blame ANYBODY else.
We used the old babbit chain that day...
Never dropped an instrument in my life.
Might have got away with it, one time, in the old days, but, damn, you'd feel stupid.
How screwed would you be if you dropped a laser scanner?
Don
I was running the Kern at about 21 - in 1981 - and had the crewchief from hell. I would learn later that a lifetime of steady overdrinking has an effect on one's social grace. His nerves were shot. He knew what he was doing, but he would often totally blow up. Most of the time he was just trying to contain his rage. It's hard enough to think about surveying without having a constant rage issue. Some of his blow ups were because of my very stupid mistakes, so the end result is I pretty much survived the couple of years I spent under the guy. It was pretty humiliating listening to this jerk spew such vile hatred towards me from time to time.
We did a long and grinding traverse through thick willows, took about 2 days, and at the end we closed the traverse and it did not close - something was blown. Of course he blew up, and I thought he was going to die as we faced the prospect of a re-do. We did the whole thing over - same result. eventually, he realized that he had given me the wrong backsight to start with (isnt it always something at the beginning of the project?). This was about as green and stupid as a crewchief could do. I witnessed a little flash of humility when he realized he had just blown about 4 days of our lives. from then on, he tried a little harder to contain his rage. I thought about quitting every day, but never had to - other influences beyond my control separated us.
I never had the guts to stand up to this guy - but didn't need to - he was living his own torture anyway.
ww co pls
- Have a nice day! Or, may your monument prevail over some guy's touchscreen.
remember lead holders?
I had one PC that while not too bad a fella, he was a real stick-in-the-mud when it came to levity. If that man ever smiled his face would crack.
I use to get into the drafting drawers early in the AM before he got there and empty out the little tins of HB lead and replace it with 6H. I would then spirit it onto the truck console unseen for his eventual use during the day.
PS -This is only funny if you've ever tried to write in a field book with a 16 penny nail. 😉
guess I'm lucky. never had a survey boss or coworker that was a jerk.
By today's standards the guy that trained me would be defined as "abusive". But he never cussed at me or yelled in my face. He didn't use a verbal bludgeon: he used a scapel and a razor. He could have made Don Rickles cry and run home to momma. When you work side by side with someone all day- every day, they are privy to allmost all of your affairs and quirks. Especially if you are 20 something and dumb as a brick. I think he didn't fire me because I was his personal shooting range. I was a Smart-Alec's dream come true- a fat, dumb, ignorant, four-eyed, long haired Zebo (his word for me) with zero talent as a surveyor, draftsman, or a human being. How many times did I hear: "Chavers, you give me a superiority complex". He criticized- no, make that ridiculed everything about me: my speech, my hair, my clothes, my friends, my surveying, my thinking, my geneology, my beliefs, my opinions, my thought processes, taste in music, taste in women, cars, on and on and on.
But, he was the best surveyor around and even though he was never liscensed, he knew more than any of the PLS's at that time. (Because they were all either old school magnetic needle surveyors who couldn't close a 100' square traverse grandfathered in because they pre-dated the registration laws or Engineers who were just given a PLS as a bennie because they graduated college or pipeline surveyors who knew nothing of boundary). I'm glad I persevered.
I worked for several that tried with me. None that succeeded. I don't bully and haven't been a green hand since I was 15.B-)
Alan
"Chavers, you give me a superiority complex".
Thet thar is a funny line!
N
As the PC working for a municipality in early 80's who liked to hire college kids in the summer, I was constantly training people. Some were smarter than others but it was kind of cool nonetheless.
One of my favorite tricks was teaching them to pound a lath in the ground. Nice innocent 4' lath. I'd tell them to just keep hitting it and don't miss. Put your hand up by the end for better aim. 90% of the time, the lath would start it's usual twitch and they'd whack their finger into a bloody mess. Kinda funny really, but they learned the hard way.
Another fun trick was to always tell your rod man (who's facing you) to keep backing up. Especially into a ditch. Good for lots of laughs.
A couple summers ago I had a kid helping me out here. Kind of a momma's boy type, but really did catch on. I did the "back up" trick, but he found himself a nice cholla cactus to contend with. You'd of thought he got hit by a train. I poured some water on the area and plucked them out with my needle nose pliers. Had some neosporon handy too. We finished up and I didn't do that any more. Cholla cactus are not surveyors friends!!!
> (isnt it always something at the beginning of the project?).
I find that it is almost always at the beginning.
Several years back I ran loop traverse around a tract that was 50 or so acres. This was before we were using a data collector, so the notes were all hand written in a field book then hand entered into C&G software. It was a pretty thick with blackberries and took a couple of days to get around it. The next day the boss informs me that my traverse doesn't close by about five degrees. Of course it is pouring rain that day, but he wants it fixed. I am instructed not to get the equipment wet, so we print out compass bearings from point to point as I ran the traverse. I get the whole speech "Fix it today even if you are out there in the dark with a flashlight!"
I drive back to the job and use a hand held compass and a 100 foot cloth chain to try to find the error, so we would only have the equipment in he rain for turning one setup. I went all the way around it twice like this and found nothing wrong. Remember I'm looking for five degrees, give or take a few feet with the cloth chain. By now it is raining even harder, so my instrument man and I hop in the truck. I sit there and enter the traverse in my HP 41 and the error is not five degrees. I missed my starting point by 0.27'.
When I get back to the office, I explain this to the boss. Turns out on THE VERY FIRST SETUP, he didn't enter a back sight angle of zero degrees. He entered.... you guessed it five degrees.
