My short career as a surveyor

When I began teaching skiing at Avoriaz, France, my greatest worry and main preoccupation, aside from all the fun I derived from instructing. was “What am I going to do during Spring, Summer and Fall?”

I didn’t want to be in the restaurant business like the rest of my family, didn’t contemplate opening a souvenir shop like my brother eventually did, and was looking for that magic job that I would enjoy and the would make me enough money to survive the rest of the year.

I had thought that being a surveyor might be the ticket. Of course, I neither had the experience nor the education and the required certification to start on my own, and would have needed to attend a specialized school full-time for 5 years in either Le Mans, Strasbourg or Paris.

These weren’t feasible options. So, instead, the eternal optimist that I am, I figured that I could start as an apprentice and self-study to pass the certification. Just half-a-century ago, I wrote to a bunch of surveyors.

One in St. Gervais, a ski and mountain resort near Chamonix, France, responded, and offered me a job at minimum wage. I just had to secure some lodging and was in business.

After a couple of month on the job (this was in the low-tech days, decades before GPS and modern digital tools), I realized that while it was a pleasant outdoors occupation, it was quite boring, non-creative and repetitive.

At the same time, the amount of study required on my own, looked downright overwhelming, not to say impossible, and I bravely decided to throw the towel soon enough to get a summer job helping my brother selling souvenirs...