Working in grads and not knowing it would certainly make for a frustrating day.
When I was in college in the late 1970s, I spent one very hot summer on a survey crew. For several weeks, I and another college student were assigned to a project to retrace and remonument the 1940s-era federal government boundary around Pine Flat Reservoir in the foothills east of Fresno, CA. The boundary was intended to follow a contour that was 10 feet above the high water level in the reservoir. Unfortunately, our party chief was not the sharpest knife in the drawer and daily high temps averaged about 105°F (41°C). Oh, and due to drought conditions from the previous winter, the reservoir was over 100 feet below high water so we got no cooling effect from the lake.
On our first day in the field the party chief had me searching for a wooden peg monument in the very middle of an unbroken 30-foot-wide slab of granite. I told my party chief that there was no way a wooden peg could ever have been pounded into the granite, but all he could do was scream at me for my incompetence. We checked and we rechecked. We had the correct distance from the previous monument, (~350 feet). We had the correct deflection angle from a reverse of the backsight…that is, until my college buddy (who was holding the instrument end of the chain) took another look at the theodolite and discovered that our party chief was exactly 10 degrees off. With the correct angle, I shifted laterally ~60 feet and found the monument in less than a minute. He didn't apologize.
About two weeks later our traverse ran smack dab through the middle of a 3-foot-diameter pine tree. While the party chief was planning a path around the tree on the steep side slope (about 1.5H:1V), I remarked that a tree that large was probably at least 200 years old and that the original boundary could not possibly have been routed that way (plus, any tree that close to the high water should have been cleared). He said it must have been "a fast-growing tree" and he berated me for "not understanding surveying" and "questioning his professional abilities." However, when I asked to see the field book and the copy of the old gov't survey we were trying to follow, he handed them to me, though he told me I probably wouldn't understand them. As I flipped back through the pages I stumbled across what appeared to be a math error on an angle. A few button pushes on my HP-55 confirmed the error. He has busted an angle four days before by exaclty one degree and had us slowly marching uphill instead of following the coutour. Had the reservoir been full, it would have been obvious. We lost almost the entire four days worth of work. He didn't apologize, though he did get reamed by his boss.
Finally, we were supposed to set signs along the boundary. The signs were to be placed at ~200-foot intervals, 3 feet inside the boundary, and facing out. The signs and posts were about the same size as for stop signs. We had to hand auger the holes, then set the posts in cement. In some cases, we had to carry water and 94-lb sacks of cement up to half a mile. Our party chief screwed up again. He located two day's worth of posts outside the boundary facing in, despite our protests that he was wrong. He didn't apologize, but he was fired that week.
It's funny now. It wasn't funny at the time. :-)
Edited: 5 Dec 2012, 1:36 p.m.