January 30, 2025 at 9:21 am

His Boss Wouldn’t Listen To Him On A Land Surveying Job, But He Bit His Tongue And Let Him Make Himself Look Bad

by Matthew Gilligan

Well, well, well, what do we have here…?

I’ll tell you what!

It’s another story from Reddit’s “Malicious Compliance” page!

And this is a good one, folks…

So hang on tight and enjoy yourself.

Start now!

Won’t listen to my warnings? You’re the boss.

“This was years and years ago, back when I was working as a land surveyor.

Basically what we would do is go out with a laser gun on a tripod and shoot it at a bunch of mirrors on a stick and because math, that would give us an extremely precise map of an area.

My dad was the one who trained me in the trade and because I have a very analytical mind and this is basically Geometry: The Job.

I had a talent for it.

Though honestly I wasn’t all that fond of the job.

Good at it, sure. Just not fond.

So one day, with my dad’s help, I get put on a survey team with a guy we’ll be calling J.

He was technically the crew chief which meant he was technically in charge.

J was a dyed-in-the-wool redneck.

This sounds like fun!

He listened to conservative radio (thus forcing me to do the same) drove a beat up old pickup truck, lived in an apartment complex that somehow had a rusted out car sitting in its front lawn, and had a stubborn streak Texas tall and fueled by his utter surety that he knew better than everyone else.

I never heard him say anything to confirm it but if I had seen a confederate flag on his truck, it would not have been out of place.

These two didn’t get along…

J didn’t like me.

I loathed him.

We would often meet up at 6 AM or even earlier to get equipment loaded and set out on a job.

I’m not a morning person. I’m definitely a night owl.

And while I’m always awake, alert, and on the ball while on site, the car ride out to the site would often lull me to sleep.

J didn’t like that.

Every time I would, fighting to keep my eyes open while ignoring the constant drone of Southern Fried Conservatism flooding out of the radio, start to doze off slightly, J started screaming his head off, telling me to wake the hell up.

If he had to be awake, I was sure as heck going to be awake too.

Ten minutes of him ranting and he’d finally shut up, only to start over again when my head drooped an hour later.

Ugh…

This is an example of J’s attitude toward pretty much everything.

He was right. I was wrong.

Suggest differently and he’d hem and haw until you just gave up.

So on to the MC of this story.

We were out on a MASSIVE job.

We had to survey an entire strip mall complex.

One of those deals that takes up an entire block to itself with lots of little alcoves and corners that made sight lines difficult.

Lots of setting up, shooting a few points, setting a traverse point, then breaking it all down again to move to the next point.

We knew already we were going to be at it all day.

So we broke everything out and got to work.

So as the crew chief, one of J’s responsibilities was that he would plan our traverses.

He would choose the vantage point he thought we could get the most relevant data recorded from, set the traverse, let me shoot it in, and then we would switch positions.

I’d set up the instrument and data collector on the traverse, he would get a backsight from our old setup location so the instrument could orient itself and knew what direction it was facing, and then he would go around with the prism and I’d take the readings.

J stepped in…

About halfway through this massive job, I’ve just broken down the instrument and I’m heading to my next traverse when J stops me.

J: “Hey, you forgot to shoot in that archway.”

I should point this out for non-surveyors.

You may have noticed that as crew chief and prism man, J is the one who picks what to shoot in.

So when he says “You forgot” what he meant was “I forgot but I want to shift the blame onto you anyway.”

J: “Go back to the last point. We need to shoot that in.” So off I go back to where I had just come from. I set up the instrument and get on the walkies.

Me: “Hey J, I’m dialed in. Just need a backsight.”

J: “You were just there. You don’t need a backsight. Just shoot it in.”

Me: I can’t shoot it in without a backsight. If I don’t get the orientation, the rest of the job could be pivoted.”

J has all the swagger but I doubt he understood three whole words of what I had just said.

He was crew chief on seniority, not an actual mind for the math.

Basically, since I had broken it down, the instrument didn’t know which direction it was facing.

So it would pick a direction at random and just assume it was facing that way.

Which means any points we shot in, including all traverses we shot from that point forward, would be pivoted around that point a random and arbitrary angle.

J: “You shoot what I tell you to shoot! Take the shots!”

Yes, sir!

So I shrugged. Technically, he was in charge.

He was the one who literally called the shots.

He was the one responsible.

So I took the shots and we carried on, with me knowing everything was being increasingly transposed as we carried on.

Cut to the end of our day.

We had finished up pretty early compared to when we thought we would be getting out.

The way we did things is we would shoot the points, then upload them to our company’s server through a desktop with a mobile modem.

This was exclusively my job because J was a monkey.

This guy was clueless.

He wouldn’t know a file repository server mapped to a network drive from his ***.

So we pack up all the equipment, get in the truck, and I start uploading our points file.

J likes to take off from the job site immediately, even though he’s supposed to wait for word from our techs confirming they got the points but by a stroke of luck, he decided today he wanted to relax with a cigarette before we left.

Usually he’d smoke as we drove but I guess he wanted to just chill.

In any case, we’re actually on the job site, not on the road, when he gets the call from home office.

J: Answers the phone, expecting permission to **** off for the day. “Hello?”

Phone: Makes muffled muttering sounds.

J: “What points?”

Phone: Additional inaudible muttering.

J: “I don’t understand. What’s wrong with them?”

Oh, really?

My ears perk. I know exactly what is wrong with the points.

Through straining my hearing and knowing roughly what the tech is about to say, I can barely make out the following.

Phone: Mutter mutter “… control points…” Mutter mutter “… over four hundred yards.”

Now one might be wondering what control points are.

Well, dear reader, I shall now edify thee with an explanation.

You see, when surveying a large area, standard best practice is to do it in a large loop.

You tell the data collector that point 001 is at position 1000, 1000, 0 and then collect the other points in relation to that arbitrary point.

So when you circle around the area being surveyed you collect the position of that same first point again as your last shot so the techs know roughly what kind of error margin drifted in while you were traversing.

And needless to say, when you’re dealing with measurements with precision down to one thousandth of an inch, an error margin of four hundred yards is completely unacceptable.

Now what I COULD have done is asked J to let me talk to the tech, informed them that J refused to take a backsight at one of the points, and tell them to take all points above point XXX, pivot them around point YYY by Z degrees.

All numbers that I had memorized.

That would have lined up the control points, compensated for the error completely, and we would have driven home having done a good job.

Whatever you say!

But I couldn’t do that, could I?

That would have indicated J was wrong. And J is never wrong.

So I held my tongue and tried not to smirk.

J refuses to believe our points are wrong. “OP must have uploaded them wrong. Idiot. Do it again and do it right this time.”

Of course it’s my fault. It was always my fault in J’s opinion.

So I uploaded the points again and the tech informed him that the points are still off.

J seizes the laptop.

Twenty minutes of the monkey poking at the keyboard ensues with him having to get the very patient tech to guide him step by step through the incredibly simple process of dragging and dropping the points file into his ***.

And again, the tech informs him the points are wrong.

He is incensed.

So minutes later we’re piling out of the truck and grabbing all the equipment again so we can set back up on the point J screwed up on (with a backsight this time, go figure!) and reshoot every SINGLE point in the back half of the job we just completed.

Told ya so!

I didn’t mind.

I was being paid to watch J curse and fume and curse me out with us both knowing I was the one who had warned him about the issue.

Of course he keeps blaming me for the screw up, but I just take that as an occupational bonus.

In the end, J got bawled out by the big boss for wasting company time and money.

My dad told me his check got docked for the screw up.

Me? I got overtime.

After all, J was the one responsible for the accuracy of the data.

I was just the monkey pushing buttons on the instrument.”

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