My family was in the excavating business. When I was a child, Dad usually operated a backhoe or a crane and he would take me to work with him on a Saturday when the job was to dig a basement for a new house. He would turn me loose on the jobsite with only a warning to "stay out of trouble" while he set to work digging the basement. Periodically, he would stop and have me climb down into the hole and hold the grade pole while he checked the depth of the hole with the telescopic level.
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