Trial Pits

One thing peculiar that I encountered here is the excessive use of Trial Pits terminology. Here we were, armed with the latest utility services drawing supplied by the Local Services Utility Provider themselves showing the 'supposedly' locations of buried cables, pipes, fibre optics and others, about to start excavating the site, when Trial Pits requirement came a flying from everywhere!
We have to manually do 'blind' diggings around the sites to satisfy ourselves that no other 'unrecorded' service lines within the area. Imagine having to explain the scope of work to few groups of 4 labors each with shovels and carts, who could barely understand what you are talking about, that they have to dig at random locations to an undetermined depth hoping to find something that closely resemble cables, pipes or any suspicous looking wires. And all that in the blistering hot July/August sun.
Towards the end, the site looked like a mortar shelled battlefield of European front during the WW1. Some so called trial-pits resembled the trench and one would be excused in expecting to see soldiers still fixing their bayonets in between bomb shellings.
Remember the scenes in All Quite In the Western Front or the scene in Twelve Monkeys when Bruce Willis was wrongly transported back.