The Day I Swore the Job Took Eleven Hours

Let me tell you about a Tuesday.

I have been running a gun since before some of you were choosing which side of the truck to sit on, and I will stand on any corner and swear to this: that Tuesday was an eleven-hour day. Maybe eleven and a quarter. I felt every minute of it in my knees on the drive home.

By Friday I could prove about eight of them, and the office had me down for seven and a half.

I am telling you this so you feel a little better about your own week.

The job that would not quit

It started clean. Boundary retracement out past the county line, a parcel the plat said should have four corners and the ground said had opinions. I rolled out of the yard at six forty in the morning with a full truck and a good attitude, which is the last time both of those things were true that day.

First corner, no trouble. Found the monument right where the record said, a nice old iron pipe with a cap you could still read if you got the sun off it. I remember thinking this one was going to be easy. That is the thought that curses you. The survey gods hear "easy" and they get to work.

Second corner did not exist. Or it existed somewhere I was not looking, which for a field crew is the same problem with better feelings attached. I dug. I probed. I glared at the dirt like glaring has ever moved a monument in the history of this profession. Found it eventually, eighteen inches off where the deed wanted it and two feet down, because the last fellow who set it apparently did not believe in daylight.

That was an hour I will never see again and could not tell you the shape of if you paid me.

The landowner and his fence

Then the landowner came out.

Now I like landowners. Half of them will hand you a cold drink and half will hand you a shotgun and you learn to read which is which pretty quick. This one was a talker. Cold drink type, thank goodness, but a talker.

He wanted to tell me about his fence. Not this fence. A fence he built in 1987 that is not there anymore, and the argument he had with the neighbor about it, and how the neighbor was wrong, and how the neighbor's son is also wrong, apparently genetically. I nodded. I ran the gun. I nodded some more. You cannot rush a man who is telling you about a fence, it is against nature.

I want to say that took twenty minutes. My gut says forty. The truth is I have no idea, because I was being polite and running a traverse at the same time and neither of those activities keeps a clock.

The drive back for the dead data collector

And then, because Tuesday was not finished with me, the data collector gave up the ghost right when I went to close my loop. Just quit. Black screen, no warning, the electronic equivalent of a mule sitting down in the road.

Spare was back at the shop. Of course it was. So I drove the fifty minutes back, grabbed the spare, drove the fifty minutes out, and finished in the last good light of the day, cursing quietly and professionally the whole way.

That right there is nearly two hours of clock, and here is the thing that got me later: it did not feel like two hours of work. It felt like nothing, because I was not surveying, I was driving and swearing. So when Friday came, my memory filed that drive under "lost time" and my body filed it under "eleven-hour day" and the two of them never once compared notes.

Friday, and the coffee-stained field book

Come Friday I sat down to write it all up, coffee in one hand, field book in the other, and I went looking for my eleven hours.

They were not there.

Oh, the work was there. The corners, the ties, the little sketch of the second monument with an arrow and the word "buried" underlined twice like the underlining would bill somebody. But the hours? The hours lived in my head, and my head, by Friday, is a liar. A confident liar. It will tell you a story with real feeling and no receipts.

I had start times for maybe half of it. I had "morning" and "after lunch" written like those are units of time you can invoice. I had the fence guy filed under a vague resentment and no clock at all. I could account for about eight hours cold, and everything past that was me saying trust me, I was there, and the office on the other end with a straight face and a spreadsheet that said seven and a half.

Here is what stung. I was not wrong. It was an eleven-hour day. I lived it. My knees have an affidavit. But being right and having no way to prove it is worse than being wrong, because at least when you are wrong you can shut up about it. I could not shut up about it and I could not prove it, and that is a special kind of Friday.

The office was not out to get me. That is the part it took me twenty years to swallow. They did not shave my hours. They just could not put down a number I could not give them, and I could not give them a number because my proof lived in a memory that had already spent the week rounding, forgetting, and dramatizing.

The kid with the phone

We have a young fellow on the other crew. Captures everything on his phone as he goes. Taps it when he rolls out of the yard, taps it at the corner, taps it when the landowner starts in about his fence, taps it when the data collector dies. By the time he is back at the shop the day is already written down, honest and boring and complete, and he never once has the fight I had.

I used to think that was fussy. A real surveyor keeps it in his head, I said, mostly to feel better about my head. But that kid has never lost an hour he actually worked, because he does not ask his Friday memory to reconstruct his Tuesday. He just has the record. That is more or less what time tracking for survey crews is: the day getting written down while it is still true, instead of Friday.

I suppose that is smarter. I am not going to say it loud, but I suppose it is.

Try Kudurru Stone free for seven days. No credit card, no sales call, no demo required. Or if you would rather have somebody walk you through it, book a demo and we will show you around. Either way, keep your hours where your Friday memory cannot get at them.

Gus is a field surveyor with more years on the gun than he will admit and a data collector he does not fully trust. He writes about the parts of the job nobody warns you about.