Activity Feed › Discussion Forums › Strictly Surveying › my word vs the office guy
Back in the 90’s I was just coming into my own as a party chief, didn’t have a degree yet and I was working for the cheapest surveyors around, but I didn’t care, I was surveying and not framing houses! I’d run a traverse around a huge abandoned gravel pit that was being eyed for development and I had at least a 16 setups, carrying elevations all the way and closed it out within a couple of hundredths for both horizontal and vertical. I was walking tall with a swagger in my step. After closing it out and handing over my data to the office pukes, I was looking forward to many days of doing topo, standing at the gun running two rods with my dog at my side. The office guy who handled my data was the owners son in law. He went out with his new fangled GPS receivers and occupied enough of my control points to get some data on them and then proceeded to move my entire survey over onto this new projection. Only problem was he didn’t have a clue what he was doing and so end up replacing every one of my control points with autonomous GPS positions, and then renumbered them all. I get back my datacollector all loaded up for me to go do topo. My first backsight check missed by 6’+ horizontally and half as much vertically. I think it wasn’t too long after that I had all my tools stolen out of his office after being told by the owner I didn’t need to take them home with me every night and he then refused to replace them. (He was subletting part of the office to a dry wall outfit). Naturally I told him if that was to be the case, then I would no longer be using any of my personal tools and other items on his jobs and proceeded to borrow a ball point pen from the secretary to use in the field book. When he complained about that I told him my mechanical pencil had been stolen and I was only using what I could secure from the office as I was no longer using my personal items and if I wasn’t worth at least a pencil to him, he could take this job and shove it where the sun don’t shine!
The lesson learned, you can’t lay down with dogs without getting up with fleas.
WillySeems that businesses like this are the first to go when they screw up big (like this time) or when times get slow.
Time to move on and find a job elsewhere… times are good now, but the future is a bit dark.
Even a grunt job would be good, for education and general seasoning.
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