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You Had One Job
Posted by jhframe on April 11, 2023 at 3:35 amI set flight panels for a 40-acre topo on March 31. Two of them were painted on a paved road, two were plastic (wide flagging) next to gravel levee roads well-traveled by farmers and walkers, and one was in the middle of a grass field. I asked the aerial guy to call me when the flight was scheduled so I could check the panels on the morning of flight day. This afternoon I get email from him: “We nailed the flight today.” What happened to my heads-up?!
Photo ID along those levees is going to be fun — nothing around but ag fields and a creek.
chris-bouffard replied 1 year, 4 months ago 6 Members · 5 Replies -
5 Replies
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Sometimes, silly people do silly things, from which it is hoped they will learn not to make those mistakes again. You can’t fix other people’s severe case of silliness.
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We had a crew set panels for a full township flight. They missed by six miles. Funny part is the incorrect panels were visible for what seemed like an eternity. Every time I drove by one with that chief in the truck I would pipe up with, “Oh look, somebody set a panel there”.It’s been about twenty years now. I may stop, I may not…
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I set flight panels for a 40-acre topo on March 31. Two of them were painted on a paved road, two were plastic (wide flagging) next to gravel levee roads well-traveled by farmers and walkers, and one was in the middle of a grass field. I asked the aerial guy to call me when the flight was scheduled so I could check the panels on the morning of flight day. This afternoon I get email from him: “We nailed the flight today.” What happened to my heads-up?!
Photo ID along those levees is going to be fun — nothing around but ag fields and a creek.
I always made the same request and very rarely did it not occur. Very stupid for them to not give you the heads up just in case.
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Good luck with that…post-flight HVs are tough when there aren’t many identifiable features.
“…people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” -Neil Postman -
When the bottom fell out in 2008 I started my own shop after being laid off. My biggest client was a multi millionaire land speculator who bought somewhere in the area of 60 lots in a town that was decimated by a forest fire in the early 1900’s with much of the area not having rebuilt.
The lots were scattered around a large mostly wooded town and I got the work to survey all of the large and small parcels. Thankfully I did all of my surveys in State Plain. I get an email late on a Wednesday afternoon that they were going to have all of the parcels flown to save money on the topo, not a big issue to me until I saw the markups of the target locations with the vast majority of them being painted crosses on paved roads but the kicker was that they had to be set before the scheduled flight on the following Monday Morning. The rush was because trees were starting to bud in the spring. So much for giving me a heads up early but I had to get this done to keep the work that was coming my way when nobody else in the area had a full time load of work with a back log at the bottom of the market.
Thursday was a day of shopping for highway paint, brushes, rollers and building hinged templates. Friday and Saturday were a mad dash to get all of the targets set and located by RTK but we got it done by 5 PM on Saturday and it’s a good thing because Sunday was a washout, but all of the paint was dry before the rain. I was able to provide all of the Target coordinates on Monday morning and sent a T & M invoice with my crew rates jacked up $50/hr because of the rush nature of the job.
By the end of the week they had a check for me to pick up and even gave me an atta boy for getting it done!
As I sit here and relate this story, I sit here reflecting on the oddities of this particular person. He was by no means a cheap man but had his oddities. I would get a request for a proposal to do between five or ten lots at a time from his PM, who happened to be a fellow PLS and one of my mentors. More often than not, my friend would tell me to bump up my pricing and send him a new copy to approve, then I would get the call to come and meet with the client for the sole purpose of playing the game of him beating me down 20% so he felt like he got a deal but little did he know, every proposal I negotiated with him was inflated by that amount and the end result was that we both “won”. He was odd in that he was stuck on 8’s. If our negotiations brought me down to $20,000, he would knock that down to 19,998.88, it’s just the way he was. He also had a huge dry food pantry set up in his office. Every week when the grocery store sales flyers came out, on Friday he would send his secretaries out shopping for the items he thought were a good deal and they would have to buy 8 of each item he chose. As odd as this guy was and sometimes difficult to manage, if I invoiced him on a Monday, I had a check to pick up that Friday. Working for him is something that I will never forget as my two man operation turned into a staff of 12 and I was able to take people that I knew and trusted off of unemployment with full time work for 4 years until the economy came back and I sold the business.
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