5th April 2010, 01:13 PM
Go away for a few hours work (fortified by bacon and caffeine, the old ways still work) and the thread's gone all sensible. Good news! Agree with pretty much everything above, but with one small reservation. In my experience there's unfortunately a small but fairly significant proportion of 9-5 diggers (I'm going to get a kicking for that phrase, aren't I!) who are never going to go to the effort of going beyond doing the absolute minimum to get paid and who will always let the side down. I've certainly tried over the years, luckily these days I'm senior enough I can work on the supervisors/project officers instead (with surprising success!), hopefully some of the right attitude will filter down the system. When did potwashing when rained off become too menial a task for diggers? - or am I just getting old and out of touch? Been having trouble with that recently.
I have, in fact, had my paperwork checked by a curator on site a few times, it does happen although very rarely and even then it's mainly a check that there acually is some! Interestingly, the best independent check I've been a victim of is inspections for whichever ISO certification it is for management systems - even though it's not an archaeologist doing the inspection they expect to see all of the company's workings including random site inspections, and it's a bit of a shock when they want a documented demonstration of how a random hole on site translates to paperwork/drawings etc, how they all cross-reference, and even, scarily in my case, how a resulting soil sample could then be traced back through the office paperwork and seiving operation......b****y h***!!!!! - was a bit lucky on that one and passed Made getting a degree look easy...
I have, in fact, had my paperwork checked by a curator on site a few times, it does happen although very rarely and even then it's mainly a check that there acually is some! Interestingly, the best independent check I've been a victim of is inspections for whichever ISO certification it is for management systems - even though it's not an archaeologist doing the inspection they expect to see all of the company's workings including random site inspections, and it's a bit of a shock when they want a documented demonstration of how a random hole on site translates to paperwork/drawings etc, how they all cross-reference, and even, scarily in my case, how a resulting soil sample could then be traced back through the office paperwork and seiving operation......b****y h***!!!!! - was a bit lucky on that one and passed Made getting a degree look easy...