07/08/2026
The Night a Monitoring Well Kept Me Up Until 2 AM
Before SampleServe was a software company, we were a sampling company. If you had a big project, 50 or 60 locations and not enough crew or equipment, you hired us to knock it out.
A national firm brought us out to Massachusetts for exactly that. Big site, 150+ monitoring wells, and maps that had been revised so many times that some wells clearly weren't where the map said they were. Finding a single location could eat an hour, sometimes more.
At the end of each day we'd gather around the master map back at their office and call out which wells we'd sampled so they could mark them off. I called out MW-9B and pointed to it on the map.
The guy running the map told me that wasn't MW-9B. I pushed back. The map had it in the wrong spot relative to a nearby driveway, and it wasn't the first well on that map that was off. He assured me I was wrong. Then he assured me I was careless.
Here's the thing about me: mistakes eat me alive. That night I couldn't sleep. I woke up around 2 AM genuinely rattled, because sampling the wrong location is just not something I do. So I grabbed my phone and started scrolling through my location photos, trying to figure out how I'd gotten it wrong.
And there it was. Spray painted on the side of the well, in penmanship only a field tech could love: 9B.
Next morning I walked in, pulled up the photo, and held it out. He looked at it and said, oh yeah, somebody mismarked that well years ago and we never fixed it. Then he admitted other crews had mis-sampled that same location before, for the same reason.
I was gracious about it. Outwardly. I'll let you imagine my internal monologue.
That whole mess is now impossible on our platform. Past photos of every location pull up right in the app while you're sampling. GPS checks your position against the recorded coordinates, and if you're outside the tolerance the PM set, you get a warning before you start. We even coach crews to shoot photos with the well in the foreground and landmarks behind it, so the next person can confirm the spot from any angle.
None of those features came from a brainstorming session. They came from nights like that one. I honestly don't think we'd have built the system as well as we did without first living through everything the paper process could throw at us.
The photo that saved my reputation is below. You tell me if you'd have called it 9B.
What's the worst mislabeled or unfindable well you've ever dealt with? Drop it in the comments. I know I'm not the only one with one of these stories.
If you'd rather your crew never has a 2 AM photo-scroll of their own, DM me.
