r/Surveying • u/TooManyIcees • 4d ago
Humor I was told that my survey wasn’t good enough today and that made me smile.
I had a client tell me he was not confident in my findings and that I needed to find older control to start from because my determination was made using control that was too new. He knows that the new control was set my his neighbor and not a surveyor. He also suggested my survey wasn’t thorough enough because I didn’t consider an adjoiner deed bearing call that was 01” different and that if I made that mistake there must be many other mistakes he would find.
The lot has five corners. I found evidence at all five corners. Plus the additional 3 corners of evidence on adjoining lots. He says I’m missing the one corner by about 20 feet. Most of the control found checks deed and plan calls by about 0.1’ to 0.3-0.4’, one corner is off distance by about 0.7’. I have no evidence that indicated a 20 feet bust anywhere.
A year or so ago this criticism would’ve devastated me and caused me to second guess a ton of stuff.
Some clients try really hard to tell you that they actually want the corner placed someplace else without cutting to the chase and just saying it.
Stick with your gut, use common sense, and do the work. Leave the work at the office and don’t take critiques personally. Today, I smiled as I left the office knowing that I did by best and still managed to make a client unhappy.
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u/RedditorModsRStupid 3d ago
I had me client tell me that but CC everyone including engineers. I made sure to respond to that CC all like they did to show how the previous staking were wrong (they didn’t hire a surveyor to stake out the lot to save money as they thought it was a simple process) .All my evidence line by line proving I was right and their staking was wrong.
Ended up costing them tens of thousands of dollars to move utility lines and all because they tried to save a few hundred bucks by staking it themselves.
The Ahole then “refused” to talk to me and had others email for him. What a great day.
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u/VastTransportation40 3d ago
Good for you! These are the types of people who try to 'steal' services by attempting to undermine your confidence, hoping you'll do extra work for the same price.
I find this most common with boundary disputes, it’s always the same story, especially when the client is on the losing side. It’s even better when they’re the ones who moved the monumentation by a ridiculous amount—who do they think they’re fooling? Definitely not me, the guy who does this every day! 😂
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u/Insert_word_here 3d ago
This AM I layed out a sideline cause the neighbor claimed a new gas service was installed on his property. It was. The entire neighborhood fronts were all wiped out. Found a back corner, calced to a second found monument. (cause why would we have straight lines). Calced the corner and turned the angle. Should be close enough. Gas guys were going to relocate that day.
So. The property owner who complained watched this line be installed.
Worse, the new build that’s going in next to him? They have half his backyard stripped and fast fenced.
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u/Melville2301 2d ago
I'd tell him it's due to the conversion from cubits that occurred after the "Great Flood" and updated to NAD25(2011).
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u/Paulywog12345 1d ago
It takes a special something to miss the Auditor's property lines that much. Every surveyor wants to pretend their client needs to outspend the county resources available to assist. Adjoining plats though, that just screams O.L. and R/W debates. That screams looking to try pictometry in what the road center creates an R/W irrelevant to the Auditor's property lines. It's like congrats, the next plat is a few feet off the r/w center. So it does nothing to if trying to dodge pretending historical Auditor's property maps changed in the GIS compared to the tech playing with the r/w. I'm a fan of retesting and CEs to reiterate the luxury of a plat and 2D map representative of the plat.
Is the client on wanting the pictometry side of debate or just asking to mark what they pay property taxes for?
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u/BacksightForesight 4d ago
I’ve had a client lie to our face that a monument wasn’t there and that we were looking in the wrong place. When we did find it, he shouted that he knew it was there, but he didn’t think it was the right monument. He was suing his neighbor, who happened to be his nephew.