Remembering Back

j-penry · 2016-01-04T20:50:00Z

This year will be my 32nd year as a surveyor and I will turn 50, so this has pretty much been my life story except for the crazy times of my youth. As I look back to the 1980's, I realize that there have been so many changes in the way we can quickly access information that many here cannot even fathom. Aerial images were very hard to come by and you had to go to a specific place to order and pay dearly to get them. Now we have Google Earth for free. Topographic quad sheets either had to be mail ordered or if you were lucky enough to have a local distributor you could go there. I was fortunate to live close to the University of Nebraska where the geology department had them. I would compile a careful list and get the ones I wanted. $5.00 each which was a lot in the 1980's. Finding the older versions was tough. Now they are all free online. Getting a latitude/longitude position meant you had to either triangulate from a known triangulation station or scale it to the nearest second off a 7.5-minute quad. GPS was still not available for the every day user. Now Google Earth has latitude/longitude more accurate than what we scaled. NGS datasheets for triangulation stations and bench marks were printed out on paper. One sheet for a tri station and multiple bench marks on other sheets. Whatever you had for the paper copy was the latest update. Sometimes you might see "Destroyed" scribbled next to a bench mark description. There was no online database. No radial search function to find multiple ones. If you were lucky, you had a state advisor you could call for assistance. Many still did not trust that thing called EDM and just to be sure, you would chain the distance until your confidence level told you it was going to be okay. I once had all the trigonometry and curve formulas memorized. Everyone seemed to have some sort of cheat sheet they carried with them just in case. Everything was drawn by hand. The 8.5"x11" letter guide sheet slipped under the mylar. An exacto knife was the eraser on cloth scraping out flecks of ink. Someone would burn a hole through the mylar with an electric eraser or shine it so bad it would no longer take ink. Leroy sets and Ames Lettering Guides were awesome tools. Having that 00 pen roll off the drafting table was a death sentence because you knew the tip was smashed beyond repair. Those little plungers with the wire would cost you $10.00 to replace. I could never keep that 000 pen clean enough to use. Someone developed a triangle shaped rubber that slipped down the barrel of the pen to keep it from rolling. Sometimes we would suck on the tips and spit out the ink to get them unclogged. If your lips were black, everyone knew what you had done. I'm still young compared to some of you. Care to share some experiences?

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A Harris, post: 352022, member: 81 wrote: Tabasco sauce goes on everything
My sister in law almost passed out when I dashed it on my sunny side up eggs........

Tabasco sauce on eggs (any style) is a moral imperative. Although, in a pinch, Cholula or Tapatio will work.

Then again, I'm rather partial to my own home-made "burn your face off" habanero sauce. Nothing like some bright orange salsa in the morning!

Posted : January 6, 2016 5:50 pm

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Remembering Back

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