There are few professions so various as land surveying. The work of a land surveyor can take him deep into murky swamps, alongside dangerously busy freeways, or into waterless deserts. Indeed, anywhere that there is land, there is a chance that a land surveyor?s services will be required. At the same time modern surveyors deal with incredibly delicate instruments that, while they are built to endure, must be protected from the most extreme of these conditions. Once the data has been collected they must be taken back to the office and analyzed. Computers and GPS have done a lot to make surveyors? work more efficient over the years but they still must put in a good deal of time crunching and evaluating the numbers.
Although about half of the work of a land surveyor is carried out in the office, few head out for work without calling the weather bureau or logging on to check the weather forecast for the day. Weather can make working in the field anywhere from inconvenient to impossible. Besides the personal comfort of the surveyor, he must take into consideration his expensive equipment. The cost of the modern surveyor?s equipment can cost many thousands of dollars so these investments must be protected. Though most are built to be abused because of the nature of the work for which they are designed, the precision required of these instruments makes them delicate in their own way.
Another common enough consequence of the unique nature of this work is finding stuff that was meant to be hidden. The work of measuring and marking land can take a land surveyor into remote corners of the world where no one was expected to go. Surveyors have stumbled over everything imaginable that was meant to be hidden for whatever reason in these remote corners from illegal dump sites to dead bodies. In fact a casual scan of the headlines reveals a corpse discovered by some unfortunate surveyor every two or three months somewhere in the world.
But perhaps the most treacherous part of this profession is the danger of politics. In many places there is a land surveyor in the local government and more often than not this position is an elected one. It makes sense that a body like a local government whose responsibility it is to maintain and record property lines would need an official qualified in these areas but this reality makes a little less sense from the perspective of the professional as a career path. It is likely that few surveyors who wind up in these sorts of positions actually set out with public office in mind. The training and work involved attracts a far different caliber of person than does politics. And although there have been many admirable men and women that successfully bridged this gap, it is fair to say that involvement in local politics is a distinct danger of this particular line of work.
As pointed out, land surveyors are a separate class of people. The combination of sometimes intense field work and patient precision makes the work unlike any other and the people who do it a rare breed. The dangers involved, while real and relevant, only come secondary to the rewarding work that this it.
| About Author Ray Eddings : |
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This article was written on behalf of http://southernphoto.com. For more information about land surveying and land surveyors equipment visit their website.
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Article Added on Friday, September 26, 2008
| Other Articles by Ray Eddings | |
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