Now that things have picked up a little bit, there are jobs that come in that I delegate my office guy to calc and the field crew to stake. I direct both activities and I make the decisions on what to hold, etc. This week there were two jobs that should have been routine that could have resulted in disaster; things could have been built according to bad information and the client (a utility company) could have lost faith in my ability to know what I'm doing.
Both of these jobs were marking an existing road right of way line to show the utility company what area they have to place their facilities. On one job, the office guy calculated a round corner at an intersection and the field crew called and said the right of way was coming out at the lip of gutter. Doh, the street is 40' wide, not 30' like it was calc'd. Disaster averted.
Today, another road right of way that was (to me) obviously supposed to be at an entrance to a public school was calc'd by the office guy with a distance of 108' from the nearest street intersection. Field crew comes back and says it didn't hit the school entrance. I check the calc's and it was drawn at 108' but the description and map say 180'. Just 72' off. I called the crew and told them to pull the lath on their way home and we'll fix it Tuesday.
Two lessons that I try to learn every so often: 1) If something looks wrong, don't assume it is somebody else's mistake. It might be yours. 2) You can delegate authority but you can't delegate responsibility. I don't know who first said #2, but it resonates in my mind quite a bit.
good luck Steve - hang tuff
david
At least your field crew had enough sense to raise questions about the location of the r/w they were sent out to stake, could have been worse they could have set it and forget it.
Gnats - Yeah, I know. That's what could have happened if I hadn't been in the office yesterday afternoon. At least the bad stakes would have sat there all weekend and somebody might have seen them and made decisions based on them before we found the mistake next week. One safety net is that I have the crew do a little mini-topo when we do that sort of thing and hopefully the office guy would notice that the right of way didn't match the entrance to the school. The thing is, sometimes people are too quick to attribute something like that to a mistake by somebody else, like the description is written wrong, not my calc's are wrong. On that same job, the office guy was calc'ing the R/W and said "It looks like the Assessor screwed up. They're showing this as 90 feet long and the description only says 50." I looked at the R/W deed and said "What about Parcel 2?" It describes the other 40 feet. Aaarrrggghhh!
I just get the hebee-jebees over stuff like that; hard for me to trust people when I see that.
Everybody makes mistakes and hopefully this is just a learning experience for him. But some people are just not the careful type, and I had an middle-aged guy who never could develop that meticulous mindset. Had to do it myself.
The kind of guy I want is someone who is mortified if they make a mistake; they will try like heck never to make one again. To other guys it's no big deal.
Hey Steve, you keep saying the office guy!!!! Has always been the office!!!! They just seem to keep being blamed, lucky you had some field guys that caught it. Now if we could figure out how to have a field guy take his info through the office and take the office guy to the field.....
Yeah, your office guy sounds like he needs pretty close supervision - hell, seems like they always do though...
The office guy actually used to be the field guy's crew chief in a previous life at another firm. Both of them are pretty smart people. Tuesday morning, unless I'm off on another tangent with more urgency attached, there will be a little pep talk about these issues. I don't expect abject groveling when somebody screws up, but maybe a little more than "My bad" would indicate a willingness to wake up and smell more coffee.
