A pleasant surprise

[mpallamary]

I received a pleasant surprise in the mail today!

[Warren Smith]

Congrats Michael! So this is in appreciation for your efforts in advancing the profession?

[David Kendall]

Great accomplishment Mr Pallamary!

Warren didn’t you get one as well?

All my ~4800 friends ought to be on the list

[Peter Ehlert]

wow, 40 years! Congrats

[Warren Smith]

20201020091056368.pdf

[mpallamary]

Excellent! It came as a pleasant surprise! Warren and I are the same vintage!

[mpallamary]

Warren, do you know if this is something new? I have not seen these before. Next year will be 50 years for me, in the surveying profession. I started in May 1971 the day after graduating from high school. What a long trip it has been. I testified in my first trial when I was 19 years old, in the Land Court of Massachusetts. It was a boundary dispute.

https://www.mass.gov/orgs/land-court

[Warren Smith]

Michael,

The cover letter says that the Board periodically recognizes licensees.

I deferred my entry into land surveying until 1975, having been a sports editor. This has been a much more satisfying career!

[hellsangle]

We may have been licensed for 40 years . . . but I had to laugh at the Cover-Their-Arse small print - "Property of State of California . . ." LOL

It was a nice touch from the BPELSG gang. Thanks BPLESG!

Crazy Phil - Surveyor to Recorder - Sonoma

[Peter Ehlert]

Yep Phil, it's a complicated bureaucracy.

[Warren Smith]

Yeah, Phil - it says that on all our licenses ...

[Lee Hixson]

....I received mine the other day. A thoughtful tribute from The Board; much appreciated. (Time so flies.)

[mpallamary]

Congratulations. It was a surprise. I sent a thank you note to Ric.

[Warren Smith]

Phil Danskin is class of 1980 as well.

[mpallamary]

I did not know that! Very good!

[Warren Smith]

Not that many of us pre-82 LS's left ...

[David Kendall]

Many thanks to all of you on this thread!
I have learned a great deal from your mentoring and leadership.
I find it wonderful that you continue to engage here and enlighten us all with your wisdom.
I aspire to follow in your footsteps

[Warren Smith]

I'm already looking forward to the 50 year Certificate.

[Peter Ehlert]

I like hanging out with you old guys. ;-)

[mpallamary]

Old! My grandson tells me I am as "old as dirt." I tell him, "No, I am older. You are older too! No one is old, we are all older!"

He looks at me puzzled.

He just turned 15!

Check out the attached!

[Peter Ehlert]

"old as dirt' is a good thing, I like it.
My path down the Survey trail began in the spring of 1970, under the wing of Cousin Dick Coughlan, but then Life got in the way so I was 32 when I was first licenced in 1982.
In California I had obtained my LSIT, and was then accepted to set for the LS exam (1977+/-).
But before the next exam date I moved to Oregon.
I thought I would save that cost and effort and just get my LS in Oregon. Wrong! Oregon required more experience, 8 years in a quasi "decision making capacity" vs 4 in California, so I had to wait several years more. Then when I was at last "qualified" in Oregon I returned to California and sat for the exam on Halloween day, 1981.

no regrets

"life is hard then you die" is not my point of view.

[mpallamary]

Cool!

Sounds like a great life adventure!

My granddaughter wants to go to Oregon State! She is a senior now.

[Lee Hixson]

How I got started in surveying:

1965. My dad was the dispatching department head at the Utah Power & Light Company in Salt Lake City, Utah. The spring that I graduated from high school he arranged an interview with the head of the Transmission Line Engineering Department. Sitting across from him in his big office he asked me which I would prefer for a summer job, drafting or surveying. Being utterly naïve and incapable of making such a choice I said "I don't know." He grabbed a notepad and pencil and slid them across his desk to me. "Print your name" he said. I did. After sliding it back to him he said, "Surveyor you are."

Thus began a 55-year career that put me through college and gave me a grand tour of the outback lands of Utah and all the surrounding states. During the winter we surveyed new power lines in southern Idaho on a 5-man crew that included a shovel amongst the equipment for digging out the snow first before slamming a steel bull pin into the frozen ground to allow for a hub to be set, two of us, railroad style, full roundhouse swings with 10-pound sledge hammers.

During the winter I worked in the office part time while going to the University of Utah. Well paid job. Back when it was still possible to pay one's own way through college. I learned how to check level notes from the field and plot plan and profile sheets, all to the tune of a dozen or more engineers loudly (very loudly) crunching numbers of mechanical Monroe calculators, tallying the exact numbers of pole hardware needed for a new line.

In the summer it was full time on the crew running straight, miles-long centerlines through tomato fields (falling in love with fresh off the vine tomatoes), across rivers, through crap filled pig farms, across wide ravines, while, down at the bottom pausing to look back along line only to spot a small cliff dwelling too high up to investigate. In Nevada, chain-sawing our way through miles and miles of juniper bushes. (To this day I cannot drink a gin martini.)

We left SLC on Monday mornings for Monday through Friday road trips, staying in motels during the week, cooking cans of chili for lunch by placing them next to the exhaust manifold under the hood and fishing after work.

And in remote locales (I'm assuming, here, that the statute of limitations has expired) strapping on 22 side arms to take pot shots at the occasional rabbit cutting across line. In less safe country we switched to wrist rockets and bought marbles by the box full, some of us achieving remarkable accuracy at sundry targets up to 30 feet away.

During my last summer with them our department head arranged for a company from Southern California to demonstrate, and hopefully sell, new fangled equipment supposedly capable of measuring long distances (P.I. to P.I.) accurately. After they measured from one mountaintop P.I. across a valley to another one our crew drug a 100-foot chain along the same route to "test" their tangent distance. We disagreed by some 40 feet, causing the boss to tell them to pack up their undependable equipment and head back to California.

After getting an M.S. in sociology and living for a year in San Francisco I tried teaching at Yuba College for a while only to realize that surveying was more satisfying. $650 worth of survey books later, I got my license and remained in a worthwhile career, hopscotching my way, Johnny Appleseed-like across California and Nevada. 55 years worth. Fitting time to retire.

[mpallamary]

What an excellent story. The CAL Surveyor should post that story!

[dharri]

The San Diego County Surveyor has a saying. Engineers chose engineering while surveying chooses surveyors. I am a classic example of that.

In 1970 I was in the Army in Vietnam. The Army had a program that would allow you to get out up to three months early. I wrote my friend back in the States and told him to get my ass into collage somewhere. Because my high school grades were not stellar, the local community collage was the only one that would take me. I did not realize until later how much the collage bent over backwards to help me. Because of my poor high school grades, I was required to take both a math and an English competency exam. Because I was still overseas, the college waived both exams. The collage had a policy that required students to register for their own classes. Because I was still overseas, they allowed my friend to register for my classes. He chose classes that he thought might be of interest to me. After I was home and attending school, my friend and I looked through the collage catalog in order to see which majors I could use the classes toward. One of the majors was land surveying. I had always been comfortable with math and liked the outdoors so land surveying looked perfect to me. After attaining Associate of Science degrees in land surveying and personnel management, I spent thirty-six years with the San Diego County Surveyor’s Office. In 2017 I received my 40- year certificate of appreciation from the State Board.

Land surveying definitely chose me.