When I was a hitchhiking teenager I ended up at this guy’s home where he lived with his parents. The suitcase phonograph he had in his room was turned up too loud for the rock album we were listening to.
His parents shouted downstairs at him for something or another (phone, friend, mail arriving etc). To reduce the volume of the phonograph quickly, he casually slapped it on one side to skitter the stylus across the disk to the inner limit switch’s audio cutout and tonearm cue point.
What a great way to turn off a device. This struck me as a particularly disgusting example of expedience, seeing as how both equipment and media suffered, both profoundly and simultaneously.
Have any of you seen this sort of lunacy (as if!)? This includes the legends of whacking old television sets (unlike modern solid state units) and ion pumped electron microscopes to improve their performance.
I’ve seen a good friend and fellow music lover sorting his CD-Rs, both blank and recorded, by tossing them into piles. This treatment would be less than ideal for regular CDs, but CD-Rs are especially delicate, since their information surface is a dye coating, which is then burned off in the proper pattern to encode the data. Any contact with the information surface is potentially damaging to CD-Rs. Maybe I’m just overly anal, but seeing my friend treat his music like this just pained me. A lesser transgression was the fact that he kept his CD-Rs in a binder. I’ve always understood that for optimum protection, CD-Rs should always be stored in jewel cases, bulky and inconvenient as that may be. Sliding the CD in and out of the binder can also damage the CD-R’s surface, since even a tiny bit of dust will be dragged along the recording surface.
I pulled the plug on my computer yesterday.
A woman came to the door and said she needed her car pushed out of the center of the street and to call AAA.
When she started to dial, she said she got noise, so I just pulled the computer plug. Not major, but in the same vein, I think.
I have an old 100 mHz pentium computer. It freezes up fairly freqently… one day out of frustration I found out that a swift kick to the machine will unfreeze it. Works every time.
My TV’s connected to one of those outlets that only works if the wallswitch is flipped on. Quite frequently, when I’m on my way out the door, I just flip the switch to turn off the TV. I imagine this isn’t good for the television…am i right? I also slap the side of the tv sometimes when it starts to screw up. It fixes it too.
What is it about sensitive electronic equipment that makes it so receptive to being pounded on to make it work better? I guess I’ll never know.
There’s a little portable foot warmer under my computer desk. I was going to plug it in the other day into a powerstrip located at about eye level, but very inconveniently located behind a never-used computer sitting next to the regular computer. I was trying to plug it in, and you know how there’s the one prong that’s bigger than the other. Well, after fumbling and manually feeling the outlet to see which hold was which, I finally started guiding the plug in, holding one of the prongs with my finger. Well, I think you can see where this is going. I don’t know what I was thinking. I received a rather solid jolt and dropped the cord and jerked my hand away. Didn’t hurt much, though, just a wierd sensation. Though I think this is contrary to most of the posts so far, which detail people abusing machines, rather than a person abusing himself, using a machine to help.
One of my first network service calls involved exactly that, i.e Whammo-ing a PC.
It was an old Novell 2.2 server, with RLL hard drives.
The owner of the business always shut down her server for the weekends, and it did not come back up on this particular Monday morning. She called my company to have a technician come out and see what was wrong.
I had experience in 3.12, but had never seen 2.2. I was worried about that until I saw how the machine was acting. The RLL drive did not spin up when you powered on the server. It reminded me of the old 286 I had where the drive spindle would stick in one spot, until you slammed the side of the case. Which I did.
Needless to say, the drive became unstuck, and the server booted immediately. Total time for the service call: 45 seconds. $180. (Of which I made my normal $11 an hour).
I told her that she should seriously consider buying some new hardware, as that machine was on its’ last legs.
In the same vein as Oicu812 I will now relate the old chestnut about the ion pumped field effect electron microscope.
A serviceman arrives at a lab to fix their FEM. Shown to the instrument he takes one look at the fuzzy image on the screen and reaches for his toolbox.
From the toolbox he extracts a 2 pound ball peen hammer a delivers three sharp blows to a module on the side of the beam column. The screen image immediately clears up and the instrument resumes normal operation.
He then puts away his tools and writes up a bill for $315.00. When he gives the bill to the lab manager who watched the entire incident, the lab manager immediately asked for an itemized bill.
The repairman rewrote the bill as follows;
$015.00 Three hammer blows at $5.00/blow.
$300.00 Knowing where to hit.
[sup]__________________[/sup]
$315.00 Total
The funny part of this story is that it is true. On old FEM’s the beam column was pumped using an Ion Pump, basically a small sputter coating module that buries any gas from the evacuated column under a layer of deposited titanium. As air leaks into the column it will interfere with the electron beam path unless it is evacuated by the ion pump that maintains the ultra high vacuum. Any disruption of the beam produces a wavering image on the view screen.
After an air inrush or prolonged operation the electrodes in the Ion Pump will become saturated with adsorbed air molecules. The quickest way to degas these surfaces is by mechanically jolting the pump to dislocate the accumulated gas molecules. (Trust me, I’ve seen this done and have done it myself.)
The trick is know where to hit this $200,000 instrument.
That’s pretty funny, Zenster. I don’t think I’ll be able to compare.
I ain’t no rocket scientist, but my Daddy is. He has said on numerous occasions that it’s not a proper rocket if it doesn’t have a hunk of wood in it somewhere. Wood, it turns out, makes for a pretty quick and effective solution of last resort, and back in my father’s day almost every launch vehicle had at least one wooden part, usually added as an afterthought.
Perhaps most notable is the V2, which had a nasty habit of burning out the metal walls of the motor and exploding. Someone solved this problem by machining a throttle body out of green oak.
Well, I’m going to take it upon myself to retale an account of something wacky that someone else has seen… Involving me, yes.
Picture this…
Drive-in movie theater. Me, my best friend Alec and this girl Daria(that whore) in the backseat. Apparently Daria was wearing a zebra pattern bra. Yea, we got it off of her. Then it somehow ended up on me. Needless to say, I got 5 bucks for stripping down to my boxers, in the bra, and running around the car 5 times.
Ofcourse they locked me out of the car, it was inevitable. Then again it was five bucks.
So there I am sitting on the hood of the car watching the movie, when I have to use the bathroom. Since Alec wouldn’t unlock the door so I could get dressed, I strolled on down towards the refreshment building, which is where the bathrooms are situated, walked through a line of people, into the restroom. The nerve of some people. They just HAVE to stare at a half naked boy in a zebra pattern bra walking past the refreshment booth.
4 minutes later, I’m back at the car and ten dollars richer. Woooo Hoooo!!
Ahh, percussive maintenance. I see it all the time, though my systems cost a little less than electron microscopes.
The undocumented way to clear the user EEPROM in one of the products my company sells is to:
(1) Install a short circuit jumper across the auxilary power supply. Go ahead. Short it.
(2) Turn on the unit. Turn off the unit.
(3) Check for smoke.
(4) If no smoke, enjoy a unit with a clear EEPROM.
(5) If yes smoke, enjoy the wait for a new unit.
