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Being a field tech for a land surveyor is pretty awful. You're out in all weathers, in all locations (usually construction). Its cold in the winter, and you're out in it. Plus the ground freezes and gets covered in poo poo, and half of the job is looking for stuff in the ground, either bars or cut crosses in the sidewalk. So in winter you've got to chip the frozen ground with a bar for hours on end looking for survey monuments. Its muddy in the spring. Its hot, humid, and unbelievably dusty in the summer. Autumn's actually not horrible. The work is pretty monotonous: look through a total station at stuff over and over and over, as you try to get marks on the exact right spot to the millimeter, or take thousands of measurements (which, at least, you don't have to write down). Plus like most of the time you're the first people on the site, so its just a field. No washroom, no trailer, nowhere to heat up your lunch. When you are working on a building its at the top, away from the windows. Worst day I ever had was on the 43rd floor of a building right next to lake ontario, in the middle of february. It was about -20 on the ground, -40 upstairs, plus incessant, gale-force wind. No windows. We'd put up sheets of plywood in hallways to avoid the instrument getting knocked over. You'd ride a hoist to the floor (sometimes, sometimes they don't have them and you're carrying a 10 pound survey instrument on your shoulder up and down 40 flights of stairs), a hoist is just a metal box on the outside of the building. Its built to the same tolerances as an elevator, and is really really safe, but its still a bit unsettling, get out, and spend the next 8 hours there, because it would take you like 25 minutes to get back to someplace to eat. Sometimes there'd be a floor with a few windows and you can crouch in between them to eat your lunch cold. Its really weird, because your body takes all the blood to your stomach to digest the food and the rest of you gets unbelievably cold. Oh yeah also you need to wear really thin gloves because you're making fine adjustments all day and typing data in to the instrument. You get these ridiculous cracks in your fingers because they're always going warm-cold-warm-cold as you put on and take off your gloves. Sometimes you get to go through forests in summer and its like 95 degrees and humid and you're practically in loving Cambodia but you're just off the 401 and yonge. Plus you get to set bars, which is like, a challenge. You get to swing a 10 pound sledge to wack a 4' iron bar into the ground, which is pretty fun, but each one is about 12 pounds and has to be carried to where you're setting it. I once had to do a golf course, we were barring, and the closest place to park compared to where we were working was about a kilometre away. So you'd put 15 bars on a sled, strap it across your chest, and just loving walk. Sometimes you get snowshoes. That's actually kinda fun, but gets old fast. Yeah so being an articling lawyer isn't so loving bad by the way. olylifter fucked around with this message at 03:36 on Aug 24, 2015 |
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Aug 24, 2015 03:31
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 07:00 |
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