The longest 3 days

I just finished up a monitoring project in El Cajon, which is the somewhat poorer city about 10 miles east of San Diego proper. The long and the short of it is that I didn't find a damn thing, and wasn't going to. Whoever did the initial assessment of the site for its palaeontological sensitivity got it dead wrong. What I was told would be eocene fine sandstone turned out to be granite rich modern alluvium. Not only that, but there was a tremendous amount of garbage in it. Not just leaves or roots or the other naturally occuring detritus that might accumulate in alluvium, but broken glass, big pieces of asphault, cement, plates, mugs, plastics, etc. I don't blame the person for mistaking one formation for another, but I got the impression that they didn't check out the site too thuroughly if at all. For one thing, the most recent geological maps say that it's alluvium right there. When I compared a sample from the site to pieces in the San Diego Museum of Natural History, there seemed to be no resemblance to rocks from the formation that I was told I'd be finding. Last of All, the project only called for moving the top three feet of earth. Unless the project site is in a canyon or the side of a cliff or something, the first three feet of anywhere are typically going to have NO fossils, it's all soil.
The fact that I didn't find anything wasn't what was frustrating, it was that for every day of actual work done on the site, I did two days of waiting for it to continue. The day that it was supposed to start, it didn't. The next two days were spent essentially standing around while the guys who did the work removed tree roots from one corner of the site. This was followed by the week-end. Monday, things went smoothly, tuesday and wednesday it rained. Thursday, half the day was spent mixing the soil and drying it out. Friday, with the exception of hitting a natural gas line, work proceeded smoothly, followed by the week-end. Monday, work proceeded smoothly for half the day, until they needed to start moving the stock pile of dirt that they'd built up and discovered that it was still too wet from last week's rain. Tuesday, still too wet and I'm pulled off the project before it even goes to completion. With the exception of Friday and Saturday nights I'd been staying at a Best Western hotel that was charging a little under $70 (after tax) per night. All this delay, meant too much time at the hotel, which means that the company that I work for is pretty much loosing money for taking this project, which they shouldn't have done in the first place and having nothing to show for it to boot.
As for me, besides the frustration of doing something utterly futile for two weeks, I'm doing fine. I'm in Tucson, Az, ready to spend my hard earned money.