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Oops, wrong town
drafted a site plan for a fairly complicated facility that required three Site Plan Reviews by the city and about 10 revisions over a 6 month period. The plan was finally approved 2 weeks ago and the bill was sent out to the client.
Well the bill came back as undeliverible today because I had put the wrong town on the address.
But wait a minute… I had Copy/Pasted the Billing address from the drawing file. All those reviews and nobody caught the fact that the wrong town was on the Title Block.
I wonder if I should tell them?
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17 Replies
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They all already know and were simply too polite to say anything. They really hate to embarrass professionals like that.
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Hate to admit it but ….
I’ve got a recorded plat with the wrong county listed. Went through at least six sets of eyes and no one caught it. That was 30 years ago and to this day not a single person has said a thing.
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> They all already know and were simply too polite to say anything. They really hate to embarrass professionals like that.
yeah, that must be it.
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95% of my work is in the county my office is in. Needless to say I’ve got a plat recorded in a neighboring county that has the wrong county on it. I caught it 6 months after recording it, when I was scanning the plats in at our home office.:-/
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I have seriously offended planning boards by having the wrong town in the PB signature block. All this copying and pasting can really bite you in the rear.
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> I have seriously offended planning boards by having the wrong town in the PB signature block. All this copying and pasting can really bite you in the rear.
Bad as it sounds, in one county in this area surveyors put wrong stuff like this on purpose. That gives the planners and board members something easy to catch.
I know one member of that board who would hold up projects for 6 months or more doing nothing more than looking for misspelled words. “I know surveyors are bad spellers and I know there has to be at least one misspelled word on this plan and I am going to keep looking until I find it.”
Larry P
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> drafted a site plan for a fairly complicated facility that required three Site Plan Reviews by the city and about 10 revisions over a 6 month period…..
I dislike reliance on checklists for quality control, but that is the sort of error that a checklist can trap. -
Reviewed a survey that had the wrong township and range for the section involved. Of course, that appeared about six different places plus in the legal description.
That particular township and range combination occurs in the home county of the surveyor of the project. Neither the township nor the range occured in the county where the job was done.
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Filed a Corner Record for a section corner resurvey. 2 months after it was filed I noticed one bearing was off by 12″. Luckily it just required to resubmit a new CR with a reference on the old CR to the new CR. To this day I can’t understand how I came up with that bearing. I went over those numbers with a fine-toothed comb numerous times. Just glad I caught it.
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In his “May This House Be Safe from Tigers” Alexander King has a wonderful story of his being retained by Pontiac Motors to illustrate an ad campaign. He was to paint elegant couples on the deck of a luxury liner, dancing in the moonlight, and he produced a beautiful painting. The agency reviewer looked it over carefully, and thought it would be better if all of the couples were rotated slightly to the left.
What he learned from this was to always introduce a silly mistake, easily corrected, like someone with two left hands, anything obvious to give the reviewer something to latch onto and justify his existence.
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Why would you dislike checklists for quality control when that is the sort of things that a checklist can trap? Maybe I don’t understand, but I totally rely on checklists for quality control. My checklist has grown as I find errors that I had missed in the past.
At one time I always made sure there was a bar scale and north arrow. Then one time I happened to find a drawing where there was a bar scale, but it didn’t scale right. So from then on, I took out a scale and made sure that the bar scale was the right size. Same with the north arrow….there might be one, but make sure it is pointing in the right direction (it’s easy to make a fairly accurate check as long as you remember to check it.) I made sure that the section, township and range was on there….later I learned to make sure the Section township and range was the right S.T.and R. for the projects location. If a plat got by me that had the wrong county, I would add “check that they listed the right county” to my list.
As to spelling, yeah….you don’t need to study the plat until you find a spelling error; but if the checker happens to notice a typo wouldn’t you rather that they pointed it out than not? I think it’s embarrassing when you spell “principle” wrong for “Principal Meridian” and I would appreciate it if someone pointed that out on my plat.
Larry, I would guess that your county surveyor that took six months to get a plat back to you, probably sat on the plat too long before they checked it, then they happened to find a typo when they finally got to it. I would be griping more about how long they sat on it, than what they found wrong.
Yeah, we can all jump on the bash-the-checker bandwagon, many of them certainly deserve it. But maybe some things can be viewed from their perspective.
For the checkers….if it’s your plan that a draftsman is working on, all your pet peeves are fair game…if you are with a county or public agency that has to “approve” that it meets statute standards, you should only worry about those statute standards as a “requirement”. It’s not up to you to decide what line weight the drafter should use, or whether you like the font (unless it defined in a statute or regulation). If you are checking plats for an agency that contracted out the work, you should make sure it meets all the requirements of the contract.
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I’ve seen plats with the wrong state on them (WV/VA flipped on both).
I’ve seen plats from one outfit with the county names spelled wrong for months on end… must have been bad in their copy & paste template… but c’mon.
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> Larry, I would guess that your county surveyor that took six months to get a plat back to you, probably sat on the plat too long before they checked it, then they happened to find a typo when they finally got to it. I would be griping more about how long they sat on it, than what they found wrong.
>The people that would hold up plans looking for misspelled words were Planning Board members in another county. They never held up any plans from me because I refused to work there. The members made no secret of the fact that checking for spelling was the hold up. Several time surveyors have reported hearing something like this: “Bill, you find a misspelled word yet? No? Better continue this one for another month then.” Everyone who did work over there finally caught on and purposely misspelled something like the name of the county in great big letters.
Also, we have no County surveyors here in NC. The people who review the maps tend to be planners and then planning board members. Some of the things they want changed amaze me. Had the local idiot turn down the plan of a surveyor from out of town 5 different times. The planner kept telling the client that the Register of Deeds was refusing to record the plat. Finally the out of town surveyor came here to ask just what was wrong. Turns out the planner didn’t like the fact that the title block didn’t have a line around it. “Everybody knows it isn’t a title block with no line around it.” But notice he never fessed up that that was his issue. He always blamed things on everyone else.
Yep, that is the kind of crap we have to put up with.
Larry P
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Fair enough Larry. I always imagine people griping about me for finding typos, where I think about “hey if I notice something wouldn’t you want me to point it out?”
I saw a whole stack of legal descriptions by a surveyor that all had a list of disclaimer-type things at the end of each including something like: “if this description is not recorded in its entirety, you may be in violation of “Statue” blah, blah, blah.”. I pointed out to him that every one of his descriptions misspelled “statute”. He kind of shrugged me off as being some kind of picky sob.
I wasn’t worrying about his typo, and didn’t care if he did process them that way, but I pointed it out only because I would have wanted someone to point something like that out for me. (by the way, I also didn’t worry about all his disclaimers, even though I wouldn’t have found them necessary on my descriptions)
If some silly guys are finding typos just as some kind of job security, or to exercise some kind of power, I think those are pretty silly reasons. There are certainly more productive ways that a guy could throw his weight around. But I am sure that pettiness exists everywhere.
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Tom,
I absolutely want someone to point out stuff that is really wrong. To date, that hasn’t yet happened with a planner*. The first few times they review a plan and find nothing about which to complain, they remark that they must have missed something. My reply is always… I made sure it was right before you got it.
*We all make mistakes and I am no exception. I just try to not let “the public” see them.
Larry P
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> 95% of my work is in the county my office is in. Needless to say I’ve got a plat recorded in a neighboring county that has the wrong county on it.
I also work mainly in one county. I have to admit, that one has happened to me also.
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> Why would you dislike checklists for quality control when that is the sort of things that a checklist can trap? Maybe I don’t understand, but I totally rely on checklists for quality control. My checklist has grown as I find errors that I had missed in the past.
Because people come to “totally rely on checklists for quality control” while in reality their checklists may serve only to ensure that the lipstick is on the pig.Ensuring that an address is correct is a trivial matter compared to the content of the mapping depicted and the quality of the underlying data. Quality control should be built into your process from initial client contact to final deliverable. A checklist may have a role in the process, as quality assurance, but not as a substitute – as it so often becomes – for quality control.
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