Kids!

Just wait. Sooner or later someone is going to moon the "camera".

We will not work in schools when the kids are around. We either work out of hours or during the holidays. Its just not worth the risks...

:good: Smart post!

~13 years working in the city (Brisbane, Australia) and the only really bad thing to happen to me was a target stolen. Legs left behind, we assume that kids just thought the prism looked cool. Usually our gear is left alone, only viewd by curious onlookers, only very rarely touched by young inquisitive minds (and most of those times the kids are generally curious, no malicious intent)

Ocasionally come across some drug related items around some parks or other (know) areas.

As for the dress code though... It might be more to do with perceptions. All schools have a school uniform here in australia, so students aren't a worry. As for Short Skirts... As a young male, I see no problem with them!
50 years ago a person in my position might have got upset that a woman was showing some leg at the beach, now days they walk around in a Bikini. I prefer the modern dress (in most cases...)

Jim,
We've worked at numerous schools from kindergartens to colleges with never an issue. All those previous were in small communities. First one in a larger city and we have problems. I think I prefer small town life.

You just have to get used to it and learn to laugh. If you really want to have fun, work in some of the housing projects in south Atlanta and other dangerous places in the south east like we do (unfortunately ALTA's and demolition related surveys for housing projects are kind of our niche).

It can be very dangerous (shootings, drug deals...robbery occurring next to where you are getting a finished floor elevation!!!), but you will see some of the weirdest and funniest things in your life working there. Note: not too many people give you a problem with a machete hanging on your belt, but I know your situation is quite different being on high school grounds though!

We also do work at one of the largest colleges in the southeast, however, young people in college aren't that bad....they just text and walk and drive, and that can sometimes be a problem. They've ran into the gun, me, and would fall in manholes if we didn't stand over them.

In 20 years of working in the VI I have had 2 or 3 instances of kids stopping to ask "what are you doing, what for, how does that work, how can I get a job doing that, what should I study in school".
I try to think about those few positive experiences and not think about how rare it is.

> Jim,
> We've worked at numerous schools from kindergartens to colleges with never an issue. All those previous were in small communities. First one in a larger city and we have problems. I think I prefer small town life.

Ditto to that!

Stacy, that is bad. Well at least in my opinion. I am a few miles south of you in Atlanta. We see the meth and crack baggies all the time, even found a few drop guns, but I have never seen kids doing it on campus. I am assuming this was a high school in north Georgia? I would expect something like that out of an inner city school but not in North Georgia. I am curious, what county are you working in?
Josh Lewis 4

W.C. Fields:

"Children should be placed in a barrel at birth and fed through the bung-hole. At puberty the hole should be sealed."

I'm not sure I share his sentiment, but I've seen a few young folks that make me realize I have become my grandfather.

My kids rode Unicycles in the fall parade, in my local town. I'll have to post a pic later.

Nate

...In most cases...

As long as the dress is longer than it is wide, I am OK.

We do quite a bit of work in "poor" neighborhoods.

The stories and photos my guys come back with are at time very disturbing and other times very entertaining.

We have been chased off of properties with Glueguns (yeah the kind with a cord). We have found a few discarded firearms. (We now report them to the local smokeys and they usually show up pretty quick.)

Schools: Don't get me started. We have had a few instrument / teenage driver accidents. We very often hear "Hey mista, take my picture." and politely explain we are not photographing anything.

For these reasons, I appreciate the "middle of nowhere" surveys a bit more.

Keep on keeping on.

>Do you "big city" surveyors find these kind of things to be common?

Yup. You can also add the occasional addict cooking heroin in an alley...always a pleasant sight.

The trade off is that there is a lot of work in the "big city" and it pays well. In addition for every crappy drug infested site you survey you also get to survey stuff like this

Christchurch is not a big city (population circa 300k) and, thank heavens, we don't have the US's problems with guns and drugs. But it is just easier working when the kids aren't around.

In fact I'm just about to spend two very busy weeks doing floor level and building surveys of a large number of schools looking for earthquake damage. We will be working inside and outside the classrooms. We could not be doing during term.

That's why my wife and I continue to live well out of town and each commute an hour or so to and from work. Society seems to be degrading across the board, but it seems that it does so much faster in urban settings.

You can expect almost anything in urban Atlanta. The City Council's approach to solve crime on a particular street is to change the name of the street. I had a crew working on a roadway project within the perimeter. They called to tell me that the robot had been knocked over on the sidewalk. It seems that they had been set up on a working girl's corner and she thought it was bad for business. She was caught on the site. Unfortunately, she did not have any assets that we were interested in redeeming for the over $3K cost of instrument repairs. Safety and security always must be considered in many areas. Yes Stacy, small towns are better for many reasons.

Haven't done any work around high schoolers down to pre-schoolers. But we did do a job around a pre-school/day-care once. They had a fenced in play ground and I had the gun setup just outside the fence when they were out for recess one day. They all piled up at the fence watching me with intense curiosity until one of them breaks the ice asking what I was doing and "what is that thing you're messing with?". "Well little partner, we are surveying.". That opened up a whole new can of worms I wasn't prepared for. Just how does one explain surveying and the instrument to a bunch 2-4 year olds? Then they had to go in and one of the chaperons/helpers comes over after they all went and she asks "well, I'm curious to. Just how does all that work?". Being quite easy on the eyes I was happy to indulge her questions.

Then there was the time we were doing a big topo job at the UNC-Asheville campus in spring-time. Talk about some serious eye-candy!!! Me and Tony both being single men, you can imagine the radio chatter between us. I remember one especially cute hottie coming up behind Tony while I was about to get a front-site shot and I call him on the radio quietly "Tony coming up right behind you, don't look, she's about to pass by!" He relaxes his stance on the rod waiting as she passed by and I'm watching through the gun the whole time. He started shaking his head as her serious cuteness passes by. After she got out of ear-shot he calls me back on the radio saying "Eric, we are surely going to hell." Another day on the same job during class changing a professor of archeology passes by me while I'm setting up. Her dept. had just bought some surveying equipment for a coming up trip to the middle east and had serious scientific questions about how the stuff works. They hadn't been trained yet. Tony saw what was going on so he came over either to interrupt or add to the explanation. He decided I was doing just fine and barely said a word. She thanked us for out time and excused herself to get on to class she was teaching. I finished setting up and Tony says to me with a smile "you enjoyed every minute of that didn't you". He had missed the part about her being a professor going on a archeological expedition so I filled him in on that. Then he wondered how come I didn't hit on her. I had to let him know that the first thing I noticed about her was that big-a$$ rock on her finger.

Then years later I end up back here in the city environ and we were doing a job somewhere near the Decatur-Atlanta limits in a rather nasty part of DeKalb county. We were both far away from the gun looking for a pin. We found what we were looking for and to get a shot we had to put the gun, a Trimble S6 robot, in search mode because it had long since lost lock on us. Some feller was walking by it when it started doing its search so he stopped to watch it doing its thing. It finally found us and we got the shot and headed back to the gun. Meanwhile the guy stayed right there with it and saw us after it got lock. He waited for us and wondered what "we was takin pitures of" and "are you guys the po-po or 5-O or something?". After spending the previous decade in the remote mountains of NC I had no clue what he was talking about. Talk about a fish out of water - yeah, that would be me.

Given Brother Carroll's experience and that last story of mine, I now understand why I was often left with gun to baby sit given it's a robot and all.
E

I just realized that I never posted about the rest of the job. My assistant was confronted by one of the students that gave us a hard time in the beginning. He was called an old, white (explitive). On one of the last days there, I was taking shots along the edge of the football field when two young men on the walkway above the seating area high above me threw a three or four pound rock at me while my back was turned. It landed 20 or so feet behind me and bounced past me. Had it hit me in the head, my old noggin would have split like a mellon. We spend about 180 hours there and took 15000 shots. I'm glad we made it out of there unhurt. I'll take a long hard look before leaping into another one like that.