Wacky Field Practices by Party Chiefs

Driven to half a foot or refusal...

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> I have also heard of chiefs just slamming a rod or two on a lot in the "general" vicinity of where the corner should have gone and calling it found.

I may be cranky having been home sick the last few days but, to me, that kind of moves past "wacky crew chief" territory and places the person who did it firmly in the category of "fraudulent lying sack of s#!t"

[sarcasm]I thought every surveyor carried an assortment of other surveyor's monuments around to use on an as needed basis[/sarcasm]

When you actually run out of things to set for monuments, cut a wood stob from a limb or whatever and drive it in with flagging wrapped around it and set the actual monument later. Just about anything can be placed in the ground accurately as a temporary marker.

I have even punched a hole with prism pole and stuffed it with flagging, cigarette butts, white sand, red clay, wood stob and/or a distinct looking rock.

Never have understood why some people battle and want to change the job description they signed on for. On day one they are instructed what they must have within their grasp at any given moment of the day and give them a readied go bag and let them know that it is their job to keep supplied.

The over-exposed plat PRM reminds me of the mowers' markers (SRD monuments) found along Florida's Turnpike in your county.

I had a PC for a summer back in the early seventies that was pretty much clueless. He had been recently discharged at Ft. Sill, my guess was his MOS was a 82C.

We were laying out a lot of subdivisions. This yahoo would chain in a curve with every point on the curve being chained from the PC. It took forever.

I finally tried to point out to him that it was possible to chain a chord from the last point we had set on the curve to arrive at the next station. I remember him telling me "then we wouldn't have any idea where we were at." :pinch:

He always wore Gen MacArthur sunglasses which earned him the nickname of "dougie" with us peons. He was also vehemently opposed to using the same TPs on a bench loop while turning "back" to the original BM. Asking him to explain his reasoning was fruitless because we were, well...peons.

He had a lot in common with a screen door on a submarine.

I think his wife got a good job somewhere else and he was gone in a few months. My bet is he eventually made the rank of PE and continued his habits of keeping his head stuck tight up his backside. 😉

One of my first PCs, a sweet guy, but promoted beyond his abilities was being berated by the Survey Supervisor one day for particularly poor closure calcs on a traverse we'd run. This was way before electronics of any kind.

"Dammit, man!” the supervisor said. "Do you even know how many degrees there are in a triangle?"

"How the hell should I know?" my chief replied, "They're all different."

Don

> "How the hell should I know?" my chief replied, "They're all different."

That reminds me of a conversational snippet that was related to me years ago in which two chainmen were heard arguing about whether you add the slope correction when chaining uphill and subtract it when chaining downhill, or vice versa.

Krohn Corollary #7

The big problem with stupid or ignorant people is,
they are too stupid or ignorant to comprehend
how stupid or ignorant they are.

> > I have also heard of chiefs just slamming a rod or two on a lot in the "general" vicinity of where the corner should have gone and calling it found.
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> I may be cranky having been home sick the last few days but, to me, that kind of moves past "wacky crew chief" territory and places the person who did it firmly in the category of "fraudulent lying sack of s#!t"

I agree. That is so incredibly unethical and goes against the entire point of boundary surveying and trying to perpetuate original control. It's about the most dishonest thing I've heard of, and I know people do that around here too. It's disgusting.

We are all ignorant about many things...

But stupid is often an acquired and practiced art.

My variant.... Ignorance can often be corrected through education, stupidity usually requires considerable pain.

> He was also vehemently opposed to using the same TPs on a bench loop while turning "back" to the original BM.

There's actually sound reasoning behind not doing so, especially on loops with only a few TPs. I'll leave it to others for the explanation.

I'm stealing that one, TBM.

> I agree. That is so incredibly unethical and goes against the entire point of boundary surveying and trying to perpetuate original control. It's about the most dishonest thing I've heard of, and I know people do that around here too. It's disgusting.
Both of my 2 sons worked on the field crew of the medium sized engineering firm I worked for when they were between high school and college, at different times, for a year or so. Neither said anything untoward to me about any shenanigans going on. They left and went on to other things and, a few years later, so did I. Only after I had left that employment did they begin to share their stories of what went on out in the field. The stories ranged from good natured cutting up, to hazing, to some pretty outrageous field procedure shenanigans.

Lets just say that I consider it a very good idea to show up in the field unannounced from time to time, just to see for yourself.