Traffic Surveys
Most of the time you are relentlessly counting vehicles and failing miserably to document with any sort of accuracy what is racing up and down your particular stretch. But every now and then you get a real boondoggler.

When I was a poor stude I worked for a civil engineering company working on a project to do with the widening of the A1(M). This one time I was asked to find a couple of friends and we were driven by our supervisor to the drop off point. Here we sat in deckchairs and were given notepads and pens and told to document what ever came through an underpass underneath the A1.

Over the space of ten hours I counted the grand total of 2 horses (with riders) and a family of four on bicycles (both twice). Nice sunny morning turned into a nice sunny day and our supervisor, inbetween trips to the driving range, plied us with drinks, newspapers and sandwiches, while my mate Pete threw stones at half a dozen pigs in the adjacent field.

The next week's survey was more interesting. Got pinched by the fuzz for standing on the Northfield roundabout in Milton Springsteen at rush hour. Apparently I was distracting the motorists...
(mersault, Thu 9 Sep 2010, 12:35, 3 replies)

Why?
What were you doing?
(SpangoTheWonderBadger is brewing beer, Thu 9 Sep 2010, 12:44, closed)

Nothing
except sitting on a deckchair, wearing a vizvest and making a spacked-up mess of surveying the myriad rush-hour mongs speeding past.
(mersault, Thu 9 Sep 2010, 12:52, closed)

So...
no running around naked spanking badgers with a horse crop?

Who'd have thought?
(SpangoTheWonderBadger is brewing beer, Thu 9 Sep 2010, 13:23, closed)