I've worked on survey teams before, usually as the poor smuck dragging chains around, and/or holding an upright rule. However more often than not I was working to mark out the land to look like it did on the map, not making a map look like the land. I will always have a special hate for farmers that use the corners of properties as places to dump scrap metal. Stone piles aren't that bad, but I once had to work out which thing of rebar was the marker post out of the 400-500 pieces of random lengths dumped in the area.

(In the end, we just drove a new marker about 10 feet onto the guy's property from where we guessed it was suppose to be. Serves him right for admitting the scrap was his.)