Fess up if you have done something similar

I remember being in the wrong block in St. Paul about 1982, not long after I got my license. Details are a little fuzzy now. The lot dimensions were the same as those in the block we ought to have been in--until they weren't. Took about a half hour to figure it out. Didn't get as far as setting irons. No puzzled homeowner came out to question us.

My brain fart was working in Block 24 instead of Block 23 for the same lot number of identical dimensions.  Adding to the confusion was the cross streets involved: 23rd Street and 24th Street.  The street numbers increased in the opposite direction of that for increasing in Block number.

My weird ability to remember absolutely worthless trivia for decades is what saved me.  I lived in that city for about three months and started out with no car.  As I was walking to work one morning in my second week, I left my apartment at 2430 Name Avenue, walked east to 24th Street, then north five blocks to Thing Avenue, then east to the third house and noticed a man in suit pants walking around on the roof of his house.  I stopped and chatted a bit with him.  He was going to put a new layer of shingles on his roof, so, I told him I had a fair amount of experience in roofing and offered to work for him.  He jumped at the opportunity.  I was thrilled to make some extra money.  While working for him, I noticed he had the very style of vehicle I needed for sale.  I ended up paying cash to buy it.  His house number was 2324.

I had a lot of close calls, one that had huge consequences. But as they say in concrete, a mistake caught before the concrete is poured is a case of no harm, no foul.

mid 80's, had title company provide an address for a survey in a subdivision.  We surveyed the lot with the address and provided plat of survey with subdivision and lot number.  They said something did not look right.  They provided the wrong address.  Lesson to be learned.

1980/81, we were in Wyoming doing some oil exploration surveys.  The landman for the geophysical firm provided us topographic map with section, township and range and drew in a line to be staked on the ground.  We spent a few days staking and the seismic crew laid down their geophones and shot several miles of line.  We all sent our data in to the Geophysicist in Denver who noticed something wrong.  The landman pigeon holed the original data and provided us with correct section but wrong township.  several hundred dollar mistake for not sharing your information.

Over many years, I have found several improvements and houses built on wrong lot where builder did not get a survey.  If everyone is nice, it gets corrected with a boundary line agreement or a lot swap.

so yeah, mistakes happen

While I have not personally done this, a survey crew i was directing in the mid 90s did. They broke down, or at least spent 1 day breaking down the section south of where they needed to be.  I was new to the company and the party chief didnt care much for my ways...he was much nicer after that incident.

As a rodman/I-man in the first year of my career in surveying, I closed two traverses around two parcels that were not our client's tracts. The first one was completely on my PLS, he marked the wrong property and a coworker and I ran a small traverse and located all existing monuments, the house, utilities, etc. and closed the trav. We found out the next day when the head CAD guy/office manager realized the mistake the PLS made.

Two days later, we went back out to the older subdivision and tried again. This time it was my fault. The office manager had marked the correct lot on the hardcopy tax map (No GIS back then) and I confused it with the abutter's similarly shaped triangular parcel. We threw down another good traverse and found all the corners. I was working full time while completing my A.S. in Land Surveying at White Mountains Community College in Berlin, NH and was proud as a peacock that we'd found everything and had something like a 1:20,000 closure. I now know this moderately good closure was due to canceling errors, as our beat-up prism pole was shaped like a banana, we used old ski poles for a makeshift bipod, and we were using a prism that I guess was used for an older total station that had a vertical offset for the EDM. I think it was a Leica Offset Prism. It took me awhile to see the pattern that all our crap closure were on high relief sites where we had to angle the prism up or down during our traverse. Anyway, it was heartbreaking when I was made aware that for the second time, I had failed to survey the subject tract. I also wondered what the other two landowners must have thought when they got home 🤔. The third time was the charm and we finally managed to survey the correct parcel.

I hadn't thought about that survey in years. I remember that one of the subdivision corners was "off" five feet and I couldn't believe that my PLS accepted it. I think I was deep in survey math at the time and had a burning desire to show off my new ability to prorate. My PLS wasn't much of a mentor and I can't recall him ever explaining his reasoning for any boundary determinations, but on my own accord I learned later that the PLS that created the subdivision was known for painting all his boundary monuments yellow. He wasn't picky about the chunks of metal he'd pound into the ground to mark corners, but he always painted them yellow. My PLS had known this and realized the corner I thought was wrong was most likely an original corner. 

50+ years ago we surveyed the wrong lot in a subdivision.  Not by mistake though.  I was a young instrument man and just followed orders of the crew chief.  As we were unloading the equipment the crew chief was walking the boundary looking for corners, etc.  What he found was a young lady lying by a pool with VERY little on.  He decided we needed to survey that lot also.  

Here on Big Island we have a 10.5-11K lot subdivision at the south end, Hawaiian Oceanview Estates, platted in the 50's and at that time "one of the largest" subdivisions in the US.  It was stamped out with geometrically identical blocks over a 10K+ acre lava flow slope without any regard to topograpghy - long straight perpendicular roads and identical 1.00 acre lots.  It was, for the most part, marketed as a tropical menagerie with street names like Paradise View, Lotus Blossom and Tiki Lane and I've heard sold as such worldwide in many cases sight unseen by folks thinking they were buying into sandy tropical beachfront with fresh coconut drinks, fire dancing and hula girls gracefully practicing in the sand.

It's, however, quiite a ways from normal conveniences, built entirely on a lava flow (almost entirely hard rock and cinder) so it's difficult to build and try to grow on and only has water and electrical service to maybe half the lots, those  nearer the "highway".  As a neighborhood there's likely zero permitting going on out there, it's known for it's high property theft and police no-go areas and the handful of times I've surveyed there I've almost always had "base station security".

One survey I was just locatiing a guys boundary so he could be sure of his limits when he brought in the D10 with a ripping hook.  It was up higher in the subdivision so no utilities and many of the lots still just empty rock and scrub.  It was at XXXX Reef Circle.   I drove the half mile up Reef Dr to Reef Circle, went past the property a couple times looking at access and checking that it was the same shape and relatiive location I'd built into CAD in the DC, then started slowly down the packed cinder drive into what became a fairly secluded low area.  At this bottom turn around spot I came into view of maybe 20-25 late-ish model vehicles parked randomly and dusty - subarus, taurus, suv's, vans - quite a mix but all probably less than 15 years old.  None were visible from the street.  Man, my spidey sense kicked in and my hair tingled the back of my neck.  I looked straight ahead, slowly backed up to turn around feeling like I was very likely being watched and got out.  On the street I pulled up the map and maps on the phone and realized I needed to be at the "next Reef Circle up" at an identically shaped and located lot.  Several hair rising stories from my time in that area - probably the only dangerous 'wild life' we have on the islands.

I finally did something like this recently, but it was pretty mild since it was caught before any money was wasted.  A guy requested a boundary survey and his parcel was within a few miles of county line.  I did a quick glance on a gis and thought he was in an old school county that doesn't put any of their records online, so I messaged him and said I'll be out XYZ day after I swing by Wrong County to get copies of your records.  He messaged back saying great, but I'm not in that county.  I was like... these aren't the droids you're looking for. 🤦‍♂️