Misadventures in Surveying #1

During my years in the renewable energy industry, I have not spent much time in the field. However, I did work closely with a series of field ecologists, whose job it was to travel to the proposed wind farm sites and collect information about the local wildlife. Someone else’s job, on a rotating basis, was to monitor the surveyor’s GPS location in case something went wrong. Although rare, accidents did happen-- several years before I started, in fact, someone had fallen down an overgrown well in the middle of Caithness and broken his ankle, and was only rescued because of an alert intern who was monitoring his location. 

The incidents that occurred during my time, fortunately, included much less actual danger and much more amusement. The first occurred during my first autumn with the company, when we hired a new set of surveyors, one of whom we will call Tim. Once hired, they were sent out to sit at their assigned survey routes to perform their observations. 

This was not what Tim did. Tim spent about five minutes filling his map with fictional entries, then drove off to the local pub to get sloshed on £15 margaritas. Fortunately for us-- and unfortunately for Tim-- my boss Bill was on GPS watch. Seeing the GPS standing still, he immediately entered the coordinates into Google Maps to see where the nearest road might be and if there were any particular hazards, such as rivers or bogs, between the surveyor and rescue. The coordinates, of course, pointed us directly to the pub, whereupon my boss rang Tim up and fired him on the spot.