All posts by Eric Gladhill
Field Notes: How far should one go?
When surveyors are searching for a corner monument, a deed, or an unrecorded plat, they are always asking themselves, “How far should I go to find this?” These searches always raise a conundrum, because, as the theory goes, not finding something does not prove that it does not exist, but only by finding something can...
How Did I Ever Get Into this Profession?
Finding My Boundaries My first job in surveying came by accident, or perhaps part of a grand plan from God that I didn’t expect. I was only 17 years old and I had dropped out of art school after just one semester of failing grades. I had tried art school simply because it seemed easier...
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...
