This guy has been spamming the newsgroups with this post now for over a
> year. He's actually found a couple people to do some work for him but they
> refused to pay them. Obviously, anyone even considering this should do a
> Google search for the past posts and read what the people that he "stiffed"
> have to say.
"There's a sucker born every minute." : P.T. Barnum
As that wise man Gomer Pyle said, "Fool me once shame on them; fool me twice
> shame me." I've never been fooled twice.
True. Hell, for me to even bother picking up a multi-page fax off my machine and flipping through it costs more than $20. You want me to then fire up Autocad (or at least start a new drawing) and we're up to ~$50. To save it, zip it, and email it, adds another $50. So.... we're at $100 and that's without any drafting time.
I've done some surveys before (really more "plat" drawings but close enough) as part of larger jobs and while they can be pretty quick to do, it just ain't worth it for less than $200. Besides, you know he's charging the client $500+.
The other factor is costs: They pay $20 per project which after taxes is ~$14. Of course there's no benefits, $14 is it. Now for the measily $14 they expect you to have AutoCAD ($600-$3800 + upgrade costs), a computer ($1500-2000), printer ($100-$300 + consumables) and email access ($10-20/month).
Just how many $14 jobs would you have to do before you've covered your expenses and are exactly getting paid? All these to be at their beck-&-call working nights, never knowing whether or not you'll have 3 jobs to do that night or none. Geez, where do I sign up?!?!
I can kind of understand detailing 2D drawings for cheap because so many people get layed off these days and are willing to do just about anything for that little bit of income. I have been there, one time I couldn't find a job for two months and was starting to run on my reserves. To keep a long story short a previous co-worker called me and asked me to do a few drawings. I made 10 2D drawings and recieved $500. Thats only $50 a drawing. But man did that help with the bills. Anyway just thought I would throw my opinion out there.
I certainly don't mean to defend the practice, but you can get mortgage "surveys" around here for $100 or so. They're generally not worth the paper they're printed on, but they can be had.
I sharpened the pencils, packed the field box, placed the stick on every data point, drew the plat, distributed the closing error, redrew the plat, plotted the points, drew the contours, swept the floor, and made the whiteprints, too.
That may be when I decided to build weapons, not targets.
I suppose now you just query a GIS database to get contours, right?
Okay, that's got to be quicker than doing all the fieldwork, etc. But it's also not a 'new' drawing, in the sense that somebody already encoded what you need, and you're just using computers to translate data from one form to another.
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