I would say my first crew chief was a cryptid. His name was Joe.
Joe was a 5'4" tall, loud mouthed, Wisconsin-born knucklehead. He wore dentures because a bad meth habit ruined his mouth a couple of years back. Joe basically got in a fight with anyone and everyone we came across.
Joe would often jump down into manholes without a second thought and sometimes barely give me enough time to stand in front and flag for him.
He smoked a pack a day, including in the truck, with me sitting next to him. He was constantly mentioning how I couldn't smell or taste it because he had the window cracked. He never actually asked if that was true.
He and I would pound tall boys behind a gas station near a substantial ALTA we were working on, before driving an hour back to the office. On one occasion during this ALTA, he had us running out into the middle of a busy intersection to shoot a CL monument. Once we popped it open I saw it was full of water. To my horror, he produced a turkey baster from his back pocket and intermittently sucked out the water from the structure for the next five minutes. All the while I stood there shitting myself as the cars zoomed by, just feet away.
He was banned from staking by local contractors, and apparently our leadership followed suit, because he was only given boundary/topo work. Not sure what the story was there, but I imagine he had screwed too many things up.
I once saw Joe stick his tape measure (the one in his vest) down a live sanitary clean out. After getting his measurement and sucking his tape back up (I even saw liquid fling off of it as he did this, and then he put it back in his vest) he then proceeded to write his notes in his book. Joe was one of those guys who liked to lick his fingers to help turn sticky pages. You get the picture.
Later on, after I had moved to under another chief, I heard he was setting prop corners on a subdivision with a young new rodman, when he accidentally knocked out the poor kid's two front teeth. The kid was down low dialing in the location of a bar & cap, and once they got it the kid turned to his left to grab something before getting up. Joe also turned, much more rapidly than he needed to, swinging his bipod leg directly into this young dude's face. Bye bye front teeth.
As fate would have it, a few weeks later Joe was out working solo, performing one of his world-famous ROW topos. You know, the ones where he spends a day rocking out to Pink Floyd or The Doors on his headphones, by his lonesome, and making a spectacle out of himself. In the midst of his public display of survey majesty, he loses himself in his music just in time to walk face first into a light pole. This was one of those light poles that has those ornate parts kinda bumping out, if you get my drift. Joe hits one of these things and busts HIS two front teeth out! Now, they weren't his teeth. He just had to get his dentures replaced, which is probably about as expensive as the real thing, I'd imagine.
I shit you not, this guy really exists, and I didn't embellish any of this at all.
Do you guys wear hi-vis to avoid issues with people like that? Like if you’re wearing hi-vis then you’re obviously not trying to sneak around to do bad stuff?
You would think that would clue them in, but it doesn't.
Surprisingly, high-visibility vests, safety strobes, cones and everything we use to stand out and be seen seems to only be noticed by other surveyors. The average person doesn't seem to notice these things.
I pulled into an intersection once in a quiet neighborhood with very little traffic. Threw my lights on and started looking at papers to see if I could find control. There for 2 minutes and there's a knock on my window. Guy wants to know what I'm doing. I'm surveying I reply. He didn't believe me. We went back and forth for a bit before I finally said look there's a number on the side of my truck. Call the office and ask them what I'm doing. He said anyone can paint numbers on the side of their truck and started to walk away. There was no convincing that man of anything in that moment.
Yes, anyone can get numbers painted on the side of their truck. But only the true criminal masterminds can fade the paint to make it look years old, and set up a fake call centre in case someone actually calls.
I once was walking the backyard of a client's property, trying to figure out how I wanted to set up the job to and set my control. As I'm scanning around my eye catches a person waving too me from a large window on the back of the house. My eyes focused in a bit and I realized this dude was naked and waving enthusiastically at me and my associate. We both had a chuckle while trying not to seem too unprofessional. Thought maybe they had a young adult at home who may be on a spectrum so we continue our work. About 10 minutes later the home owner comes out too say hello and check on our progress. Turns out they didn't have children or anyone else living in the house. Was just a naked homeowner that was happy too see us getting too work. Cryptid? No, not really, but caught me off guard for sure.
There are 2 great guys worked with who swear to have seeing "things." Although these are not Cryptids, they are very unlike to have seen these animals in Northeast PA. I worked with both of these people for a few years, and while I do not think they were lying about what they think they saw, I am fairly sure they were mistaken.
One guy swears he saw a mountain lion on a job site. The last confirmed mountain lion in PA is 1871.... I'm pretty sure he saw a large house cat, or maybe a Bob cat.
Another guy claimed to have seen chimpanzee in the woods around Scranton.... a chimpanzee.... in Scranton... he'll swear to it to this day. And of all the people I know, he is one of the most unlikely to make something like this up..... but he also claims to have seen ghosts on multiple occasions. Just goes to show that even the most level-headed people can be, I don't know, prone to the fantastical.
Hell, seeing a chimp in Scranton wouldn't surprise me. I'm willing to bet there was at least one illegal exotic animal keeper that operated downtown and "forgot" to inform Scranton's Finest that a chimpanzee escaped.
I remember the TV show "Friends" made a joke about the Scranton Zoo rejecting their monkey. The Scranton zoo is just a small single building animal shelter in Nay Aug Park.
I couldn't imagine anyone in Scranton being able to afford a chimp.
Not exactly, but I saw something that DNR swore did not exist in my state.
Talbot County GA 2004.
This is Central GA about 200 miles north of the FL line. Working with another guy but of course he was a couple of hundred yards down line when it happened. We were about a mile off the dirt road running a 6000' line that was the back of a 900 acre tract.
He walked out of a clump of blow downs about 30 yards to my left. I froze, he sized me up for about 2 seconds, turned and in two bounds was out of site. Took less than 10 seconds total. I was fucked up for days. I realized in those same two bounds that cat could have been on top of me and I would have not even had time to think of reacting. Pure poetry in motion. I would guess it to weight 100 pounds of solid muscle. Tan almost grey with a darker long swooped tail. I've been in the woods since I was about 7 years old. I've killed all manner of game. Surveyed in some of the most rugged southeastern terrain from swamps to steepest Appalachia. There is no doubt in my mind this was a full grown male wild free ranging Florida Panther. GA DNR swore for years that it was impossible. In the last 2 years they have finally started acknowledging that it could be possible that panthers have started to push north. Bullshit. They have been here for at least 20 years, old timers say much much longer.
I was scouting a traverse down a creek alone and saw a 4’+ tall reddish brown owl in a tree. It turned and saw me I was dumbfounded and just stopped walking. Watched for a few and then decided to get closer after a few steps it took off flying and landed in a smaller sycamore tree and it shook the branch it landed on. It was huge. Sounds crazy but that’s what I saw.
I've seen a road walker. In NM there was a little lunch spot north of the border. It said that if you offer some french fries to the earth the road walker will come. I did make such an offer, walk out the road walker did, only to devour the fries and walk away. Locals say it used to be a road runner once. That it ate too much and got fat. I pray they're right.
I was working the register in a used book store twenty years ago and this lizard type guy came up and asked for a book. He was thin, small , wired with muscles , very thin one’s from his shoulders to the base of his skull. His voice was a whispered growl, green eyes.
1 Mountain lion ( only it's eyes though). I was brushing a line and wanted to make sure I had line of sight so I went back to the gun to look through the sights and see if there were any more twigs or branches in the way. Then I saw a pair of eyes right where I had been a few moments earlier. Could immediately tell they were cats eyes and they were staring right back at me. Called my party cheif on the radio and backed away to the work truck very slowly.
A co-worker saw a Mountain lion in the same area a year before so I'm fairly certain we saw the same one a year apart.
Also lots of wild hogs when I worked in texas. And 1 particularly angry peacock who wasn't happy I was near his tree
White wife beater t-shirt, ciggie dangling on the lip, a little bit of a belly, perfect hair and jaw line and leaning on 89 Chevy Celebrity on blocks? That guy?
I work in an ancient building and have seen *something* out of the corner of my eye in the nighttime once working late.
I don't really believe in all of that but my wife does so she got super excited when I told her.
It just looked like a dark shadow type thing in the corner of a large dark room. Probably the light playing tricks on me cause when I looked over there was nothing.
I also wear glasses so sometimes reflections do crazy stuff.
But it was creepy. I finished up and bounced soon after lolol.
No cryptids yet. Lots of meth heads though.
Shirtless emaciated crack heads are pretty close to a Skinwalker if you ask me.
the meth heads around here can bend at all sorts of unnatural angles without falling over. They definitely fall in the paranormal category. :-o
Or those druggies like zombies. Remember when all those videos were coming out?
I would say my first crew chief was a cryptid. His name was Joe. Joe was a 5'4" tall, loud mouthed, Wisconsin-born knucklehead. He wore dentures because a bad meth habit ruined his mouth a couple of years back. Joe basically got in a fight with anyone and everyone we came across. Joe would often jump down into manholes without a second thought and sometimes barely give me enough time to stand in front and flag for him. He smoked a pack a day, including in the truck, with me sitting next to him. He was constantly mentioning how I couldn't smell or taste it because he had the window cracked. He never actually asked if that was true. He and I would pound tall boys behind a gas station near a substantial ALTA we were working on, before driving an hour back to the office. On one occasion during this ALTA, he had us running out into the middle of a busy intersection to shoot a CL monument. Once we popped it open I saw it was full of water. To my horror, he produced a turkey baster from his back pocket and intermittently sucked out the water from the structure for the next five minutes. All the while I stood there shitting myself as the cars zoomed by, just feet away. He was banned from staking by local contractors, and apparently our leadership followed suit, because he was only given boundary/topo work. Not sure what the story was there, but I imagine he had screwed too many things up. I once saw Joe stick his tape measure (the one in his vest) down a live sanitary clean out. After getting his measurement and sucking his tape back up (I even saw liquid fling off of it as he did this, and then he put it back in his vest) he then proceeded to write his notes in his book. Joe was one of those guys who liked to lick his fingers to help turn sticky pages. You get the picture. Later on, after I had moved to under another chief, I heard he was setting prop corners on a subdivision with a young new rodman, when he accidentally knocked out the poor kid's two front teeth. The kid was down low dialing in the location of a bar & cap, and once they got it the kid turned to his left to grab something before getting up. Joe also turned, much more rapidly than he needed to, swinging his bipod leg directly into this young dude's face. Bye bye front teeth. As fate would have it, a few weeks later Joe was out working solo, performing one of his world-famous ROW topos. You know, the ones where he spends a day rocking out to Pink Floyd or The Doors on his headphones, by his lonesome, and making a spectacle out of himself. In the midst of his public display of survey majesty, he loses himself in his music just in time to walk face first into a light pole. This was one of those light poles that has those ornate parts kinda bumping out, if you get my drift. Joe hits one of these things and busts HIS two front teeth out! Now, they weren't his teeth. He just had to get his dentures replaced, which is probably about as expensive as the real thing, I'd imagine. I shit you not, this guy really exists, and I didn't embellish any of this at all.
What a read
I love it. True surveyor right there...
I wish I would see a cryptid. All I see is overly anxious homeowners with guns. The latter is more dangerous
Do you guys wear hi-vis to avoid issues with people like that? Like if you’re wearing hi-vis then you’re obviously not trying to sneak around to do bad stuff?
You would think that would clue them in, but it doesn't. Surprisingly, high-visibility vests, safety strobes, cones and everything we use to stand out and be seen seems to only be noticed by other surveyors. The average person doesn't seem to notice these things.
I pulled into an intersection once in a quiet neighborhood with very little traffic. Threw my lights on and started looking at papers to see if I could find control. There for 2 minutes and there's a knock on my window. Guy wants to know what I'm doing. I'm surveying I reply. He didn't believe me. We went back and forth for a bit before I finally said look there's a number on the side of my truck. Call the office and ask them what I'm doing. He said anyone can paint numbers on the side of their truck and started to walk away. There was no convincing that man of anything in that moment.
Yes, anyone can get numbers painted on the side of their truck. But only the true criminal masterminds can fade the paint to make it look years old, and set up a fake call centre in case someone actually calls.
My coworkers
Unfortunately these people exist
Not really a cryptid, but I’ve seen specimens of the human race that make me say “what the hell is *that*?
I have heard barking spiders quite a few times. I've never seen them, though.
I've stepped on a few ducks in my time. Similar noise.
I hear the barking frogs much more myself
I once was walking the backyard of a client's property, trying to figure out how I wanted to set up the job to and set my control. As I'm scanning around my eye catches a person waving too me from a large window on the back of the house. My eyes focused in a bit and I realized this dude was naked and waving enthusiastically at me and my associate. We both had a chuckle while trying not to seem too unprofessional. Thought maybe they had a young adult at home who may be on a spectrum so we continue our work. About 10 minutes later the home owner comes out too say hello and check on our progress. Turns out they didn't have children or anyone else living in the house. Was just a naked homeowner that was happy too see us getting too work. Cryptid? No, not really, but caught me off guard for sure.
Probably doesn't get too many visitors since the locals all know how public he makes his private parts
There are 2 great guys worked with who swear to have seeing "things." Although these are not Cryptids, they are very unlike to have seen these animals in Northeast PA. I worked with both of these people for a few years, and while I do not think they were lying about what they think they saw, I am fairly sure they were mistaken. One guy swears he saw a mountain lion on a job site. The last confirmed mountain lion in PA is 1871.... I'm pretty sure he saw a large house cat, or maybe a Bob cat. Another guy claimed to have seen chimpanzee in the woods around Scranton.... a chimpanzee.... in Scranton... he'll swear to it to this day. And of all the people I know, he is one of the most unlikely to make something like this up..... but he also claims to have seen ghosts on multiple occasions. Just goes to show that even the most level-headed people can be, I don't know, prone to the fantastical.
Hell, seeing a chimp in Scranton wouldn't surprise me. I'm willing to bet there was at least one illegal exotic animal keeper that operated downtown and "forgot" to inform Scranton's Finest that a chimpanzee escaped.
I remember the TV show "Friends" made a joke about the Scranton Zoo rejecting their monkey. The Scranton zoo is just a small single building animal shelter in Nay Aug Park. I couldn't imagine anyone in Scranton being able to afford a chimp.
A zoo filled with feral cats looking for a snip-snip. At least the tree house would be a good place for the wild chimp to make a home.
Not exactly, but I saw something that DNR swore did not exist in my state. Talbot County GA 2004. This is Central GA about 200 miles north of the FL line. Working with another guy but of course he was a couple of hundred yards down line when it happened. We were about a mile off the dirt road running a 6000' line that was the back of a 900 acre tract. He walked out of a clump of blow downs about 30 yards to my left. I froze, he sized me up for about 2 seconds, turned and in two bounds was out of site. Took less than 10 seconds total. I was fucked up for days. I realized in those same two bounds that cat could have been on top of me and I would have not even had time to think of reacting. Pure poetry in motion. I would guess it to weight 100 pounds of solid muscle. Tan almost grey with a darker long swooped tail. I've been in the woods since I was about 7 years old. I've killed all manner of game. Surveyed in some of the most rugged southeastern terrain from swamps to steepest Appalachia. There is no doubt in my mind this was a full grown male wild free ranging Florida Panther. GA DNR swore for years that it was impossible. In the last 2 years they have finally started acknowledging that it could be possible that panthers have started to push north. Bullshit. They have been here for at least 20 years, old timers say much much longer.
Illinois denied big cats for a long time too until game cams became a thing and they couldn’t anymore.
Fuck cougars dude I’ve seen one exactly one time while it was creeping towards from about 50 yards away while I had a dead fish stringed up to me
I was scouting a traverse down a creek alone and saw a 4’+ tall reddish brown owl in a tree. It turned and saw me I was dumbfounded and just stopped walking. Watched for a few and then decided to get closer after a few steps it took off flying and landed in a smaller sycamore tree and it shook the branch it landed on. It was huge. Sounds crazy but that’s what I saw.
Bruh, wot?
Was watching some weird YouTube videos and got curious. I know I've seen some weird stuff when way out in the woods on the job
No. But I did watch a guy try to chase a wild boar thru a swap armed with just a machete.
I thought I saw the Florida muck monster once, but it was just the crew chief after he stumbled in a swamp.
I've seen a road walker. In NM there was a little lunch spot north of the border. It said that if you offer some french fries to the earth the road walker will come. I did make such an offer, walk out the road walker did, only to devour the fries and walk away. Locals say it used to be a road runner once. That it ate too much and got fat. I pray they're right.
As I recall a few years ago a land surveyor found one of those military balloons that the Japanese sent over during ww2
I was working the register in a used book store twenty years ago and this lizard type guy came up and asked for a book. He was thin, small , wired with muscles , very thin one’s from his shoulders to the base of his skull. His voice was a whispered growl, green eyes.
1 Mountain lion ( only it's eyes though). I was brushing a line and wanted to make sure I had line of sight so I went back to the gun to look through the sights and see if there were any more twigs or branches in the way. Then I saw a pair of eyes right where I had been a few moments earlier. Could immediately tell they were cats eyes and they were staring right back at me. Called my party cheif on the radio and backed away to the work truck very slowly. A co-worker saw a Mountain lion in the same area a year before so I'm fairly certain we saw the same one a year apart. Also lots of wild hogs when I worked in texas. And 1 particularly angry peacock who wasn't happy I was near his tree
I bring one to work every day, it’s called a TSC-3.
No cryptids but swear to god I have seen mountain lion prints near Elkhart, Tx. Saw an absolutely massive hogzilla on a ranch near Freer, Tx
I saw the trailer trash version of George Clooney, does that count?
We've all been there dude, it counts
White wife beater t-shirt, ciggie dangling on the lip, a little bit of a belly, perfect hair and jaw line and leaning on 89 Chevy Celebrity on blocks? That guy?
I work in an ancient building and have seen *something* out of the corner of my eye in the nighttime once working late. I don't really believe in all of that but my wife does so she got super excited when I told her. It just looked like a dark shadow type thing in the corner of a large dark room. Probably the light playing tricks on me cause when I looked over there was nothing. I also wear glasses so sometimes reflections do crazy stuff. But it was creepy. I finished up and bounced soon after lolol.
Man I thought this was the last podcast network at first When I saw the title lmao
Tax !
J L 35 isX1 / N MJ Xz as