I've done quite a bit in Texas. Claw your eyes out? Not for a licensed surveyor. We like challenges.
Get a hold of some surveyor notes that for a vector says something like "N60W, about the length of time it takes a man to roll a cigarette while riding a horse in mid-stride."
I kid you not, that's a real thing a surveyor wrote. WTF? How fast does this man roll a cigarette? How healthy is his horse? And what the actual ****?
I ran into countless things like that.
Had a tract that came to be about 200 acres off on a 400 acre tract of land. I don't know what that surveyor was drinking that day, but I reckon Fearless had something to do with it. How can you be 200 ac. off on a 400 ac. piece of property?
We mostly used a program called Deed Plotter to punch in the field notes, though my first bosses were sticklers for learning how to use the engineering scales and a protractor to do it the old-school way. The problem was figuring out where the mistake was when something wasn't transcribed correctly or the lawyer who put the deed together or the surveyor he used was drunk. If N60W gets changed to N60E in a string of 200 lines, you get nonsense, and it's not obvious where the error is. Well, to some people who had been doing it long enough, it kind of was. I knew guys who could spot the problems very quickly and fix it, though I didn't reach that point.
I don't know much about land-surveying, but I do know trying to cipher through a lot of their old field notes in Texas counties can be quite a chore. It varied heavily by county. Some counties routinely had pristine field notes from surveyors (and property title, too)--the sober companies, perhaps--and some counties had awful field notes and title too. The more recent surveys from, say, the 1990's on, were mostly very good everywhere, and much cleaner and easier to deal with. Those surveyors in the old days......oof....it was like a box of chocolates, never know what you're gonna get.
