Nate The Surveyor, post: 345572, member: 291 wrote: ..Surveying. It's a way of life, not really a job. A job is what you get at the dollar store!
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That's funny you should mention that Nate. I was sold into indentured surveying slavery at an early age by my father. From the age of 9 or 10, most of my weekends were spent with Pops dragging me all over with a chain.
I remember when I was 16 (I had a car) Pops told me a fellow surveyor needed some help for a day. At my father's urging I showed up at the guy's house early one morning and we worked all day. At the end of the day he gave me a ten dollar bill and thanked me. I was a little taken by that. Bill, the old drunk that ran the Phillips 66 only paid me $0.75 an hour to pump gas and wipe windshields. I had never actually looked at surveying as a source of income because Pops never paid me. I was happy as a lark with a WHOLE ten dollars.
One time I encountered something similar. A good friend of mine had split 80 acres into two tracts by following a series of fences, for the most part, and a small creek area for part of the way. About six years later I was called on to make an additional split, which required I follow the full length of the division lines from six years earlier. Everything was going great except until one corner was nowhere near where it was supposed to be, and following the description, everything else after that was off. And not by a few feet but by about 80 feet. There were no monuments to be found anywhere close to the record locations.
So I went to the starting point and worked backwards, finding monuments all along the way until I hit that one corner. After much head scratching I discovered the "mystery" corner right where one might expect it to be but not in agreement with the words on paper.
Nearly all monuments had been set first along that line and then a random traverse made with side shots to determine their location. This was in the days of primitive handheld calculators, pencils and paper. What had happened was that on one calculation of a monument location from the traverse point delta x and delta y were accidentally switched. Together we pored over his handwritten notes until we found the glaring error.
Dang, Payden, I can sure relate to that! Dad paid me 0.25 an hr, and NEVER paid me. It was dong on the books. When I NEEDED something, I'd mention it... and then he'd pay... however he made me add it all up, and it was not really like getting paid, as there was much separation between work and pay!
Of course, I had an older brother, that was makin 0.35 an hr, and I was jealous! (Like only a younger brother can relate!) But, I finally learned to spend it about once a year, and got a motorcycle.....
Richard, post: 345554, member: 833 wrote: Distances are something you read off a GPS, Google etc or just follow your IPhone.
I have noticed that distances are rarely given on my phone. It is usually "12 minutes to your destination", OK How far is THAT?
vern, post: 345592, member: 3436 wrote: I have noticed that distances are rarely given on my phone. It is usually "12 minutes to your destination", OK How far is THAT?
Would that not be a function of your current speed at the time? :whistle:
[USER=833]@Richard[/USER]
Right you are, at least as I've experienced young folks today. You buy the app and everything is taken care of. Mind you, that's not all bad. Many students are motivated by apps to delve into a lot of the how's and whys of processes. But, as we read here often, blindly accepting technology-produced results is dangerous, and many more students do just that.
As a young'un, two baseball stats, ERA and games behind, fascinated me. I played with numbers and devised seemingly logical concepts until I figured them out. My app was the newspaper, an app that's rapidly dying.
The Latitudes and Departure on the first line does not compute. The rest is okay. The check marks are red on the original.
Yep, we see it all the time in show biz families, athletes' families and many others among the rich and famous. Works the same for those of us in more modest lives. The lack of any real family focus is, I think, the root cause of a lot of the learning problems that teachers encounter.
But, ponder this. My degree is in mathematics while my sister is a PhD in English. Her son has a degree in applied mathematics while my daughter is a PhD in higher education. Maybe the common denominator is that we all like school.
The only pay I got for surveying as a kid was when My Dad traded some surveying for a lemon head pointer. That was the most hard headed dog known to man.
