Nice old boy calls a while back with a little problem. He had his property surveyed in 1983 by a really fine surveyor. He remembered that when I did a survey for the neighbor to the west five years ago that I had found all four of his lot corners to help cut up the neighbor's large tract. The resultant tract the adjoins his west boundary has a few mobile homes on it and the current owner is an out-of-state jerk who only cares about his net income from the tract. That fellow finally hired some doofus to clean out a big pile of scrap iron that was next to my guy's northwest corner. The call came because he knew the doofus had ripped out the pin. He has hired an excellent fence builder (former client of mine) to put up a stout fence to keep the riffraff on their side of the line.
I pulled out my notes from five years ago to confirm where the missing pin had been. We arrive, shoot in the other three corners and then stroll up confidently to set a new monument. As the pole tip touches down we hear a small "clink". The original pin was still there, undisturbed with a ring of concrete about 24 inches in diameter surrounding it. The other three pins were all set in concrete and up about one inch above dirt. Why he was so certain this one had been destroyed, I don't know, but there was a couple inches of loose dirt obscuring things. He clearly had not got down on his prayer bones to investigate. But, when you are 86 years old, that isn't the first thing you choose to do.
Hate to bill him, but, I will.
