Must be mellowing in the Autumn of my career

Please note that I did not refer to her as an old biddy.?ÿ She is about 15 years younger than I am so she can't be old yet.?ÿ However, biddy is the nicest term that might convey her demeanor.?ÿ (The more she talks, demeanor she gets.)

I worked on a couple of parcels years back that came complete with the quintessential "old biddy".?ÿ Long story short she had always thought a large pecan tree a ways behind her house was on her property.?ÿ When the lath line indicated otherwise she told me that "I didn't know what I was talking about" and refused to pay for the survey (that she had initiated).

The neighbor was delighted and, after talking to me, offered to pay half the bill if I would meet the fence company out there when they arrived to build his fence.?ÿ I did.?ÿ The old biddy stood nearby and ranted and raved for nearly an hour.

Come to think of it that was first and last time I ever gave the finger to a an ex-client.?ÿ She never paid but it was worth it.?ÿ 😉

We had the "ol' biddy" on a lot line survey in Beverly Hills.

While sighting down the line through the landscaping without trying to completely whack it down she came out and started bellowing at my helper that he was on her property, yadda, yadda, yadda.?ÿ While searching for the plumb bob string to put him on line so he could set a point on line he politely told her that he was working for a licensed professional land surveyor who knew what he was doing and he was marking the line according to the instructions as radioed through the trees and bushes and she was welcome to come out and talk to me.?ÿ She kept threating to call the police?ÿ which we encouraged.

After about a half hour of this he stood up (he's six-foot-three inches) and yelled at her "My doctor says my medicine won't work if I get excited!"

She slowly backed into her house and we never heard from her again.

We had an old biddy yelling at us years ago. She got so agitated that she grabbed the transit, threw it over her shoulder and ran into her house. We needed the sheriff to get the gun back and then hang around till we finished so she couldn't swipe it again. I thought my older boss was gonna have a coronary watching that instrument bouncing up the steps and through the back door.?ÿ

@ontarget1

Oh man!!  We had an old biddy grab our instrument box once and start dragging it off but never actually grab the instrument!  It was an old school Geodimeter all metal case/vault so she didn't drag it too far before letting it go and just going back into the house.

Funny part of this was that she was about 120 years old at the time and weighed in only slightly heavier than my 60 pound lab. Boss simply could not believe that she carried that gun all that way without dropping it. And it was still on the tripod.

Back in the 1990s we were Surveying a lot on a cul d sac with pavement, ditch and slope. The EP was maybe 10 feet from the R/W. Found a capped rebar on the Lot corner at the R/W and was setting up on the slope to tie it in when this lady came charging out of her house screaming and yelling I was trespassing. I calmly said I'm standing in the street whereupon she starts questioning my ability as a Land Surveyor because anyone can see the street is way over there. It didn't help that my boss showed up and starts in on her. I don't miss Surveying residential lots, people are crazy.

Of course the issue is we have no apparent authority to be there unlike a cop or firefighter. Who is this guy who is trying to tell me where my land ends? These days I just wear Fire Department blue, not even an official uniform-just blue pants, blue station T-shirt and blue FD ball cap, it's amazing how well that works.

I think we've had some version of the old biddy.?ÿ My favorite was and old "phart" that didn't believe the iron pin we had uncovered was in the right place.?ÿ We had just turned and doubled the angle to it so the party chief called him over and told him to look through the instrument.?ÿ Sure enough the crosshairs were splitting the pin.?ÿ The old fellow shook his head and muttered, "Well I guess it is in the right place then".?ÿ We didn't laugh until we were in the truck on the way back to the office.

Andy

I recall getting into a back and forth with an octogenarian women who could not believe that we needed to survey her acreage again in order to subdivide it. It had been surveyed many, many times before. After about 15 minutes it finally emerged that the "surveyors" had been students from the nearby community college, where her husband had taught music.?ÿ For his part, he spent the whole time standing well back and snickering into the back of his hand while looking the other way.

I have had my share of run-ins with disgruntled biddys (pronounced differently).?ÿ Yesterday, while test driving a new horse. periodically having to detour onto lawns to avoid cars on the road, a little old lady came out of her front door and hollered at me, "Hey you, come back here" in a tone that sounded all too familiar.?ÿ I never even left the pavement in front of her house but thought I might as well face the music.?ÿ I turned the horse around and carefully stayed on her driveway.?ÿ She disappeared into her house for a minute and came back out and marched up to me.?ÿ Turns out, she collected every carrot she could find in the house and just wanted to see the horse and dogs.?ÿ We chatted for ten or fifteen minutes and it made her whole day and she nearly had tears in her eyes when we finally walked off.?ÿ Sometimes it doesn't go like you expect.?ÿ Now I'm going to give a bunch of hateful people the benefit of the doubt for the next several years because I completely misread her tone.

?ÿ As a side note(hijack), the new horse performed very well, smooth as silk gait, calm, even tempered, not spooked at anything.?ÿ I put her out in the pasture with some geldings and they had a fine time getting to know one another.?ÿ She came into season for whatever reason and was running around with her tail up.?ÿ My wife came home to ride her new horse for the first time and the mare was wound up tight, dancing nervously, sidestepping, and generally being unruly and a completely different horse than I rode that morning.?ÿ My wife was not pleased.

@dave-karoly

People are crazy...but defending your homestead is a deep instinctual reaction that is quite normal. I have heard absurd things from the mouths of quite sane and intelligent people, but they are not thinking with the frontal lobe when it comes to defending what they consider to be part of their home. They are in flight or fight mode, even when they do not realize it. 

Surveyor etiquette...

YES?ÿ

No

?ÿ

?ÿ

@flga-pls-2-2

I was prepared to go "NO" on her.  She backed off just enough to prevent hearing STFU in all it's loud glory.

Now I am very respectful of old folks and will go out of my way to be courteous.?ÿ

But a couple of summers ago I was as carefully as possible digging up a ROW iron in a flower bed right when the adjoiners showed up in their vehicle and parked their car.?ÿ She started going off on me and I continued to explain what I was up to.?ÿ Well she was having no part of it and just kept it up for about 5 minutes as I kept working.?ÿ She admitted to planting her flowers over the line and onto the street but that didn't matter to her one bit.?ÿ I mean she REALLY kept on me the whole while!?ÿ Finally after I left that spot she went into the house and I went about my business locating other things down the road in the opposite direction.?ÿ My instrument man was set up on the opposite side of the blacktop from the flower bed and from down the road in very slow motion I see some old man exit the house and is headed for my instrument man with his walker in very slow motion.?ÿ Eventually he starts going off on my helper so I stop what I'm doing and run interference on the old guy.?ÿ I wasn't as accommodating and after a few minutes he swore at us and hobbled back home.?ÿ They were quite the pair.

I figured I had riled something up so since my client was home I eventually knocked on the door and reported what happened.?ÿ He just smiled and nodded that's the way they are.?ÿ These were lake front lots with an access road and then a railroad all running parallel to the lake.?ÿ My client told me that these adjoiners had just recently passed around a petition trying to get the trains to stop blowing their whistles when they came up on the nearby intersection.

I've got a 'move' I've only used once in defense on a particularly odoriferous wino that needed to move on.?ÿ Let me see if I can describe it:

It's an imitation of a snapping snarling dog.?ÿ I make a particularly hard and sharp "K" sound in my upper palate and then immediately (while lunging my head a little bit forward) snarl by inhaling through my nose and make my palate rattle loudly like I'm snoring.?ÿ I started doing it while playing "get that tum-tum" with the grand kids.?ÿ They always thought it was a hoot.

The wino's eyes got big as half-dollars and he almost tripped trying to back away.

Maybe I'll try that on the next old coot that wants to give me some friction...they might call animal control on me. 😉

We were setting the interior lot pins on a subdivision that the original surveyor had been paid for setting said pins but had only set the exterior points (half a*sed) and cup tacks in the streets at PCs, PTs and intersections where he said RR spikes would be set. Developer sued, everything was settled and he hired us to finish 3 years after they had started selling lots marked by the original surveyor with lathe on the corners. A few houses had already been built but at least half the lots we empty when we got there. We were walking well onto an empty lot to set the rear corner when this old lady comes out. Pins setter says hey, nothing she just stares at us. I'm paying attention to the rod bubble so I just ignore her but I'm getting madder the longer she stares at us. I am not a bear in Yellowstone. Finally she asked what we're doing in a condescending tone and the pins setter speaks up "setting the property corners ma'am" but I can tell he's getting irate. She said "well it's about time, we've only lived here two years, where have you been". He tries explaining about the other surveyor but she cuts him off with "well do you have to walk across my sod?" They were in between two empty lots and had sodded 15 feet onto each. I'm picking up the lathe to write the lot numbers on it when he says "well ma'am, I left my superman cap at home this morning so I'm doing the best I can". I just bust out, and she storms off.
?ÿ 15 years later I'm was searching for a pin in the middle of some 20 foot diameter pines, probably set about the time the lot was split off 20 years priors. This lady comes out and I address her write away because I think I'm more mature. She starts off with "may I help you" in the voice that does not sound helpful to me. I tell her "no thanks, been doing this over twenty years I think I've got it" and kept looking. She thinks for a minute, sees the company name on my shirt and figures out what I'm doing and says I'm in the wrong spot the property line is on the north side of the pines. About that time I find the pin near the north side of the trunks and said to her that she was right but white pines grow rapidly and in 20 years the skirts grow but not your property. Again with the storming off. Do they send some of these women to Gone With The Wind storming off school?
?ÿ?ÿ Had the ole fart who was suffering from dementia but I didn't know it at first. Had just finished up setting stationing in the road for a bridge replacement when I sent my instrument (wo)man on the other side to set up and get ready to shoot some more topo when an old man came out of the literal tar paper shack to chew me out about being on his property. Thankfully we'd shot everything we need on his lot the day before when he was gone so I didn't know what he was talking about, we were on the pavement, he did own to the center of the road but ??? He then proceeds to point down at one of the +50 marks that I had just set and painted and tell me that means he owned north 50 feet and he was going to stop letting everyone use that road. I tried to explain that I had just set it and it didn't mean what he thought it meant. He was getting madder and madder then abruptly said "I'm going in the house and get my gun and if you ain't gone I'm going to shoot you". Wasn't real scared, I could have walked to the door at a leisurely pace and stopped him, he was 100 lbs. and about 200 years old. I told him to do what he had to and he took a step back and stepped on a walnut and the look on his face was priceless. Have you ever seen the Carol Burnett show and the old man Tim Conway character that took 2o minutes to walk across the room and whenever he'd get exited he'd make a wide eyed face. That was this old man. He was in slow motions stumbling backwards down into the ditch. I reached out and steadied him and he forgot everything we were talking about. Wished me a good day and went back home. We never should have stopped for lunch. We left and parked down at the cemetery to eat lunch and listen to Paul Harvey. By the time we got back the old man had forgotten we'd even talked. That's when I figured out he was suffering from some sort of senility. Took a much different approach.

@ontarget1

Several months ago some guy came out of his house, unhooked the boat battery from the base, and took it inside his house.  Sheriff was called and he managed to get it back.  This thief wasn't mad, just crazy.  The sheriff was familiar with him and said the guy thought the base was some sort of government surveillance device.

@dave-karoly

I seem to get the same effect from a plain old vest.  I also walk fast which makes me look busy so people seem to leave me alone.