Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Math is Fun!

This hangs outside my office. It can get a little sporty at times with the engineers but it is mostly all in fun.

I have a brother-in-law engaged in the same dual profession. At the last 4th of July family get together he was talking about starting a business putting nanoseconds in a small cardboard box and selling them like pet rocks.

I know two as well. Both got their LS before the state changed the licensing requirements, so they were grandfathered in. But as the saying goes, "Man's got to know his limitations," so they usually keep out of the surveying, but do get involved in the construction staking, on their own design projects.

Keeping in mind the hubris that goes along with professional work, I've never seen a CE admit they were wrong, but they seem to be more pleased when the surveyor finds a "discrepancy" before improvements were built as opposed to afterwards.

Keep a mirror handy.

I've got it on my monitor, chief.

I'm my biggest fan and worst critic, everyday.

I know what you mean. While teaching calculus, differential equations and the like for a few years I found it hard to avoid an occasional public mistake.

Ask my wife.

Making a survey "miscalculation", even if it doesn't go public, burns me up to no end, sometimes for days.

Of course, with the current curriculum of the OP, all I have to do is explain my logic, even if faulty, and all is forgiven.

I've been too hard on myself for no reason.

On a side note, my college diffyQ professor's wife was my local physician. Lucky for me, he had a good sense of humor. I'd walk into class and say, "Did your wife tell you she saw me nekkid yesterday?" He'd reply, "She doesn't talk business with me." Left the rest of the class scratching their heads, no doubt.

I have worked with an engineer before and the plan set was all sorts of [bleep] up. I asked him what the deal with it was he told me the plans are not wrong, but it was the 80/20 rule. He elaborated, you see once a plan set gets to the point that they are 80% correct the remaining 20% consists of too much tedious work and it is not cost efficient to correct the remaining 20%. It is best just to let the set go to construction and between him, the contractor, and the surveyor they will iron the remaining "dependencies" as they come up.

You see the plans weren't wrong it was designed that way.

As you work things out, keep asking him if the "dependency of the moment" is part of the 20% or the 80%.

I had fun with him alright, and he has actually became a good friend since then.

At one point in the project we were tasked with staking a 6' wall that was lining one side of a storm pond. The pond sloped up at a 2:1 for 2 feet then because of setback issues with a roadway that was part of the design in a fill section, on one side the wall was needed. The bottom of pond was at say elevation 100.00; then then up 2 feet at 2:1 puts you 4 feet back with a finished grade of 102.00. The designed grade of the bottom of wall was 102.00.

So you basically have a 6' wall built in a retention pond on a 2:1 slope without over excavating for a foundation and keying the wall into the native ground, and this wall was also by default part of the structural integrity of the road because the fill was up against it.

I asked him if he thought 80% of that wall would still be standing in a few years.

Here is one from today.

Our engineers are working on a grading plan for a plat, there is also a plat to the southeast of our site. as part of the city requirement between our plat and the piece to the southeast we are to finish the water loop connection. They are going to stub a line to our property and set an air release valve and maintenance manhole just their side of the property line, then we will finish the loop for them once our plat gets underway.

We call and get the other engineers CAD files so we can connect to them with our design. In a meeting this afternoon I notice a jog in the property line from said engineer. We have surveyed this line and know that is not the case. I call said engineer and let him know the issue that we can't be having a air release and maintenance manhole in a back yard of our plat.

I call the engineer to see if I can get in contact with his surveyor and see why they put the jog in the property line. The engineer informs me that they never had it surveyed, but that they used a PDF that showed the property line and they tried to scale and fit it to some of their line work.

I just finished a 60 acre High School campus. The school district never had the money to begin with and "value engineered" the whole thing. After 18 months we were on addendum 16, only problem was the school district refused to pay the engineer to build a new CAD file for the surveyors so the last 8 months or so all of our stakes had the old info from addendum 6. I basically had to field fit every piece of concrete and asphalt from then on......about 250,000 squares worth.....Got to the point where the survey stakes were kind of like the map in the mall.....You are "kind of" here.

That definitely fits with your screen name.

The new math...

I used to put this on the back of my student's tests when they would whine...

If I recall correctly, we never had to consider time zone differences with those problems.

Not surprised this thread went here. Leave it up to surveyors to bring it here. I have my own VERY WELL EARNED reasons for hating and speaking against the civil engineering profession, none of which are described here. Oh wait...........one of them is that I hate surveyors who wannabe engineers.

IMHO....surveyors = wannabe engineers......every last one of them. Okay, almost. Many flunked out of engineering school and had to choose second fiddle, which leads to their ego problem. This is quite common. This also comes from me witnessing soooo many of them starting their own firms (and finding some loser engineer as a partner) so that they can illegally practice engineering by preparing plans and engineering documents......and nobody can stop them. They want to produce plans and I've even seen them stamp them in incredible acts of ego, even tho not enough of them get reported to the state BTR's. They beech and piss and moan about civil engineer incompetence.........but then they wanna be one. Totally inexplicably hypocritical beyond belief.

Anybody who envies another due to ego problems has a big bad case of Little Weiner Syndrome.

Wish I had back the tens of thousands of dollars in bonuses I lost due to company surveyor staking errors. Even in gov't now.......I still have to deal with incorrect boundary surveys and faulty simple legal descriptions and plats and dedications fraught with legal errors that are typical questions on the state RLS/PLS exams and should be avoidable.

Nope..........engineers are always right.

You mean like the engineer that tried to survey in my clients boundary line by using a approximately scaled PDF in AutoCAD and designing his client improvements right up to his property line. Yeah engineers never try to do survey work and fhug it up.

Seriously dude my experience with engineers is mostly positive and the fun I poke is just that fun. It is also my experience that only insecure ass holes can't take a little joke every now and then.