land surveying – Go Retire Psychiatrist

I was just thinking about the old-time land survey crews. When I was getting on the job training as a survey technician, the typical land survey crews were at least 2-3 persons. One rodman, one instrument man, and a crew chief who organized the job, which could be property or construction jobs.

Nowadays, you get by sometimes with one man doing the jobs using a theodolite that measures angles and distances. You don’t always need a physical measuring tape; you can use something they call “total stations.”

It’s cheaper for engineering companies to use one man survey outfits. On the other hand, one disadvantage is the lack of mentoring for learners who want to become land surveyors or civil engineers.

Mentoring from surveyors on the survey back in the day not only taught me such skills as how to throw and wrap a surveyor’s steel tape—it also taught me how to work well with others as a team. Of course, this was transferrable to working on the psychiatry consultation-liaison service in a big hospital as well.

It’s well known that playing cards in the truck while waiting for the rain to stop was an essential skill. I don’t know how they manage downtime nowadays. We didn’t play cards on the consultation service during downtime, partly because we didn’t have much downtime.

Anyway, as I mentioned in a recent post, we played Hearts in the truck on rain days. I always sat in the middle. At the time, I was a terrible card player in general. It was a cutthroat game and I had trouble remembering which cards had been played.

When you consider that the strong suit of engineers and surveyors is math ability, you’d think that survey crews would have figured out a way to play Cribbage during downtime. You can have a Cribbage game with 3 or 4 people although I’ve never played it that way. If there are 3 players, it can still be cutthroat.

The one problem I can see is that, the guy sitting in the middle would have to set the board on his lap. You’d almost need a special, custom-made board which would have a space for placing the cards to keep track of what’s been played. I think that might have made things easier for me.

The other drawback to one man survey crews is that pretty much the only card game you can play is solitaire.

The other day we had some stormy weather roll across central Iowa, although it was not as bad as the tornado that swept through Greenfield. We hope the best for them. We didn’t actually get a tornado, but I remember wondering why the siren went off about 6:00 a.m. It woke me up and I wondered what was the matter. Turns out it was a tornado warning and we had to sit in the basement for a little while. It was a little scary, but the storm moved east pretty quickly northeast out of our area.

For whatever reason, this eventually led to my reminiscing about my younger days. Maybe it was because of a temporary scare and increased awareness of our mortality.

I used to work for a consulting engineers company called WHKS & Co. in Mason City, Iowa. This was back in the days of the dinosaurs when it was challenging to set stakes for rerouting highways around grazing diplodocus herds.

I was young and stupid (compared to being old and stupid now by way of comparison). I lived at the YMCA and took the city bus to the Willowbrook Plaza where the WHKS & Co. office was located on the west side of town.

I usually got there too early and stopped for breakfast at the Country Kitchen. The waitress would make many trips to my table to top off my coffee while I sat there waiting for the office to open. That was fine because I had a strong bladder in those days. I left tips (“Don’t cross the street when the light is red”).

My duties at WHKS & Co. included being rear chain man and rod man, at least when I first started. A “chain” was the word still being used for a steel tape for measuring distances. It was well past the days when land surveyors used actual chains for that purpose. You had to use a plumb bob with the chain to make sure you were straight above the point (usually marked by a nail or an iron property corner pin) you measuring to and from.

You and the lead chain man had to pull hard on each end of the chain to make sure it was straight. It was challenging, especially on hot days when my hands were sweaty and the chain was dirty. Callouses helped.

The rod was for measuring vertical distances and an instrument called a level was used with that. One guy held up the rod which was marked with numbers and the guy using the level read the elevation. Another way to measure both horizontal and vertical angles used a rod and a different instrument that we called a theodolite (older instrument name was “transit”).

We worked in all kinds of weather, although not during thunderstorms. In fact, when it was looking like rain out in the field, a standard joke for us sitting in the truck waiting for rain was to draw a circle on the windshield (imaginary, you just used your finger although if your finger was dirty which it always was, you left a mark) and if a certain number of drops fell in the circle, you could sit in the truck and play cards.

When we played cards, it was always the game Hearts, which I could not play skillfully at all. I always lost. But it kept us out of the rain. If a big thunderstorm blew in, we just headed back home.

We never got caught in a tornado.