You don't even have to have equipment to get people wondering.
When a friend first told me about geocaching, I decided to see if I could find his cache without GPS or other equipment. I converted his lat-lon to distances off the park boundary and tried to pace it off.
One of the distances was from the dead end of a street and when I went to pace that, the nearest neighbor came out and told me in no uncertain terms he wouldn't let me put a road through his favorite park. It got pretty tense and I was starting to fear violence before I got him calmed down.
As it turned out I was just a little too far off to find the cache, mostly because I didn't have a straight shot from one direction.
I once was doing some topo inside the grounds of a newly built minimum security prison. There was a pretty good bird bath in one area that didn't get graded properly, so the engineer wanted verification of buildings, FF's, some MH's & the bird bath & surrounding area.
We had to remove the tips from the rod & tripod, and we were directed not to talk to inmates during their outdoor time of basketball, tennis, etc (it was like a summer camp). We were also each accompanied by a guard.
One curious inmate asked me if "are you doing this topo to get rid of that puddle". I started to answer, but the guard interupted and told him to go away. But I did just kind of nod & smile to the guy, as he watched me take all the shots. Maybe he was a surveyor with a DUI (plenty of them around).
The funniest part is the bell went off, all the inmates quit playing and went back inside their buildings (ping pong & card time). The guards just went to lunch and we were all alone while we finished up (a union issue). That was spooky shooting buildings with inmates peering out the windows.
We were poppin' SSMH lids and dipping inverts for a GIS in the City of Vallejo a few years back. We would get all kinds of people asking us what we were doing. My favorite response was:
"Were doing a corn consumption survey for the USDA."
Most people just nodded, gave us a puzzled look and went on there way.
:good:
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