All posts by Eric Gladhill

A Story About an Orchard

It’s a normal progression in the career of a surveyor to move into personnel management, as one becomes more experienced and gets promoted to a management position, or as they operate their own private practice. One of the first and most obvious problems is that not all good surveyors are good at managing people. Give...

Sometimes It’s What They Don’t Say 

When you’re trying to get something accomplished, it’s always disappointing to come up against that person who wants to disagree vehemently and debate the subject at hand. Sometimes when a surveyor is performing his duties to recover property boundary evidence in the field, the owner of an adjoining property may come along and try to...

Interesting People

While surveying in the field, you never know who you might meet. When we worked in a residential neighborhood, there are always some property owners who come out of their houses to ask about the project. On one such occasion around 1989, a gentleman came over to the instrument and started to ask what we...

Safety First

If you look at a list of the most dangerous jobs in America, you won’t see surveyor listed in the top 25, but I believe that is because most of us only spend a small percentage of our time working along the highway or on a construction site. As many can attest, those situations are...

It’s Hard to Find Good Help

It seems that “Help Wanted” is posted everywhere these days; from billboards to hand-written signs and everywhere on websites seeking to help employers who are hiring. We hear it discussed at surveying society meetings, around the office, and in casual conversations on the street. Some people try to place blame on the government for handing...

What’s the Buzz?

While I was employed at Rettew Associates, Inc. in the late 1990s, I worked with a great survey technician by the name of Craig West. Craig and I got the opportunity to work together on a big boundary survey for the National Park Service along the Appalachian Trail in Maryland. The boss sent me because...