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Bad day
Ever have one of those?
Today we are working out of town with a four man crew. Our job site is a 1.5 hour drive from the nearest motel. We get up early and leave the motel at 5:00 AM to be able to start at sunrise. We get to location and are setting up the base and a realize I left all the receiver batteries on the charger in my motel room. ???ª
Made the three hour round trip to go get them and now we are up and running.
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27 Replies
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I once drove an hour and half to re-stake a celltower and guy wires (20 minutes of fieldwork max). Realized while setting up that the prism and pole and been removed from the truck and not put back. We were supposed to meet the boss at another site in a couple of hours to complete a full survey for a new tower site. This was before Google and smartphones so I went to the closest gas station, called information and got Hayes Equipment’s phone number, called them and got their address, bought a map and made a mad dash to Shelbyville, TN. I pulled out a my personal credit card and bought a 15′ rod and prism and high tailed it back to the job site.
That rod went home with me at the end of the day and became the one that I used daily for several years after getting licensed and setting up my own business.
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If you find yourself without a prism for a job with short distances like a cell site, you can go to the nearest hardware store and get a few of those red reflectors on fiberglass poles intended to put beside your driveway, and a hand level for plumbing. Hillman brand is best, with a range of about a hundred yards on my old old Topcon.
Not the most precise but probably good enough for that kind of job.
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Batteries left at home.
Total sta left at home.
Forgot to get more rebar, stakes, or flagging. Or all of the above.
Left hammer on job. Last job. 100 mi. Away.
Dropped box tape into sanitary sewer.
Base battery left at home. (Run off truck batt.)
File folder left at home.
After 40 yrs of surveying, um… You probably have done it all!
Forgot glasses. (Aging there, so memory, and eyes both need assist!)
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Forgot to do the job.
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Did the job, but forgot to send it to the client. Got an email a few months later, not asking for it, but assuming we’re “incapable of doing it”.
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A few years ago we were surveying a number of existing filling stations (=Gas station in American) for MOBIL Oil. Carried out the days work, processed, sent it off – nobody had said anything for some weeks until they let us know they had TWO properties on the same road, about 400 yards apart – we had surveyed the first one we came to; they wanted the second one! Bother.
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One Friday, I asked if I should pull the digital level rods out from the back of the truck since it would be parked at the PCs house over the weekend. The more experienced guy above me said, “yeah”…
Monday AM rolled around and I showed up to find equipment loaded and everybody seemed ready to roll. We got out to the location 1.5hrs away only to find that the level rods had not been loaded up that morning after all. I said, “I leaned em up against the wall in the shop next to the level box”. One of the guys from the office brought them out to us while two of the guys fished and I felt shame. Thought we could share the blame a little bit as a 4-man crew since they were plainly visible next to all our stuff that did make it in the truck, but nobody else agreed. I should have checked for myself and developed a bad attitude for the day…
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A fellow in our office was assigned to survey a ferry landing. The engineer provided an 8 1/2 x 11 pencil sketch of the area to be surveyed, showing the adjacent river. The river runs north through that area. After it was done and delivered the engineer pointed out that the north arrow on his sketch pointed down.
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I heard a story about someone on a county crew leaving a truck out at a jobsite. He forgot he drove himself to the site and rode home with another crew member until the boss seen the truck at the job site around 7pm.
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I drove the length of Massachusetts without a tripod one time. My boss had on his office wall that obscene cartoon that some of you will remember that was captioned “I bet that’s the last time you’ll forget the tripod”. I never did think that cartoon was funny. And no, I didn’t pose for that cartoon.
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One of the city crews left a backsight out and drove into the office without it.
It just so happened that the supervisor drove that way home, recognized it as one of ours and picked it up.
The next morning a meeting was called for a stern lecture. When the supervisor asked if there were any questions, one of the party chiefs asked, “Did you check it before you picked it up?”
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Job was on Harrison Lake in British Columbia. Access to the site was by boat, boat ramp an hour and a half from the office. The day went pick up the boat, haul it tot he lake, put it in the water, boat 20 miles up the lake. Got there about 11am. We had forgotten the batteries for the gun.
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Lost the transit. Working for BLM in a remote part of Idaho. Hike in the site was 1 1/2 hours of misery. So we got into the habit of leaving the transit with a rain bonnet on it tucked away in the bushes so critters wouldn’t use it as a scratching post. Came back the next day and couldn’t find it! The terrain was kinda repetitive rolling forested hillside. It took a full work day to finally find it.
Lost a chainman for 40 hours in heavy forest. Another long hike out and he didn’t show up at the campsite. We went back to look for him ’till nightfall, then went looking for him at the crack of dawn while one crew drove to the nearest ranger station with radio communications. Search and Rescue said they’d start searching the following morning if we didn’t find him. One S&R guy shows up around 10 am *with* the lost chainman, who was in bloody clothes and missing a shoe. Turns out we were near a low drainage divide and he’d gotten turned around, crossed the divide and dutifully headed downstream, not realizing he was heading 180?ø the wrong way. It was a 20 mile hike through horrendous terrain, the creek became too big to hike down, he got a touch of heatstroke, fell down a coupla slopes, etc., ’til he finally broke out on a forest Service road and was picked up by a passerby. I point out that this guy was the worst outdoorsman I ever worked with. ????
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Very similar to the above. To continue our traverse we hiked back thru some of the densist woods to the steepest hill on a hot hot muggy day. Set up the tripod over the nail open the instrument back pack and guess what no battery on top of it.
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If all the hammers I’ve lost were to suddenly materialize in the back of my truck I’m sure that I would have a broken axle and 2 blown tires..
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On a hydropower project I worked on years ago, we had a mutha sized mobile crane at the intake that needed to be relocated to the powerhouse. Pilot vehicle goes ahead, turns right at the main road intersection and heads up river to the powerhouse. Mobile crane following behind arrives at the intersection, and turns left towards the city. This was in the days of no mobile phones, and presumably since it was only going to be a short trip no radios. Took the pilot vehicle an hour to catch the crane, just as it entered suburbia – I think they followed the trail of snapped overhead tele cables. Crane driver offered a plausible excuse, something about the difference between the left and true left of a river.
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A young man called his mother and announced excitedly that he had just met the woman of his dreams. Now what should he do?His mother had an idea: ??Why don??t you send her flowers, and on the card invite her to your apartment for a home- cooked meal??He thought this was a great strategy, and arranged a date for a week later. His mother called the day after the big date to see how things had gone.??The evening was a disaster,? he moaned.??Why, didn??t she come over?? asked his mother.??Oh, she came over, but she refused to cook??.?
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Drove about 4 miles with the data collector on the roof of the truck…was wondering why a few people were looking at me strangely.
I to also have kept the maker of 3 and 8 pound hammers in business for decades.
Left and driven back for more back-sights than I will admit to.
Surveyed the wrong house.
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- Not really much of a time killer but a little embarrassing. I’m currently working o. A large commuter rail mapping project where track time is at a premium. For the last 2 weeks I’ve been working out of my rented Yukon. Over the weekend we got enough tracking time to make high railing possible. We transferred all of my gear to the highrail and headed to the starting place past several real work group. Set up the trolley only to realize I had left the GS16 in the other truck. No problem, only a couple of thousand feet back to the truck (parked in a locked compound) . Get back to the trolley only to realize the cables are still in the Yukon. Took a lot of kidding. After all of that we had to ditch the client’s high rail because of an intermittent short in the shots that kept closing the crossing gates in Austin.
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Left a backsight set up on a construction job for a couple weeks because it was a royal pain to get to. When I picked it up, it was absolutely covered with bird $hit.
Dropped a field book down a sewer manhole. Fished it out using 2 shovels like chopsticks.
Opened the lid of the tool box about 5 seconds after the pc put the level there. It fell on a rock. Thank God wild built some solid gear.
Worst one: forgot to put my boots on, or in the truck, one January day. Worked all day in about a foot of snow in tennis shoes. That wasn’t fun!
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