Life....

[Dr_Doggy]

haha, I call my pups monkeys too!
Also expressing that you have a problem is ok, since it is what someone does when they dont know what to do.
Wheels dont get greased if they dont squeak, unfortunately i dont know what it takes to bring order to a society.

To demonstrate my ignorance i have heard one problem is that it is very hot and little water, which could explain short tempers, if water was the problem i would show you this:
https://www.futuristspeaker.com/2013/09/tapping-into-the-waterways-in-the-sky/
or
https://www.gizmag.com/airdrop-wins-james-dyson-award/20471/

If there are truly that many bad techs out there, it maybe beneficial to start training seminars where these bad techs can go to learn, or what about phone support to them for a fee. However these techs may not think they need the help, so they wont pay tuition fees. In which case you could have a good market ploy:
Job done right first time! which will also accommodate a bit higher pricing for repairs.

Maybe not, but i hope you get the drift, an idea is like a virus and teaching them to fish will solve alot more than trying to fix each problem individually, again i cannot relate, but it sounds like you are surrounded by lemons, the only positive is that there is much room to make lemonade.

And this is why i hope you are wrong about one thing tv, about forums dying, the forum is an advanced communication system where we can globally come together to discuss, review, resolve, evolve, integrate ideas and form solutions. Where dreams can be rationalized to form realities, methods can be made better, and newbs can learn applications. The forum is the ultimate lemonade machine, it can communicate some of our best ideas and form group efforts to solve complex problems, and catch angles that others miss.

It seems to me you are a dreamer tv, you dream for a better world, so maybe when you close your eyes to-nite, dont think about the guy who gave you a buzz when he came to you with bad experiences from another tech, all you need to come up with is a way to reduce your friends problem in the first place, nip it at the root. If your solution is sound then the idea will spread, and evolution will have no choice but to take course.

Here is a dream i had: cow farts deplete the ozone layer, but if you collect the fart in a bag you can burn it to heat energy , with that you now have hot water , with a byproduct that will harm ozone less and feed trees. Using simple processes the energy can then be manipulated to do other work, like purification.
What have your farts done for you?!

Again sorry for my ignorance, but i hope you get where im going.

 

[KeepItSimpleStupid]

Oh great, the next "Kickstarter campaign", attachable tails for humans that collect farts. so we can be green and don't deplete the ozone layer.

 

[tvtech]

Lol KISS

 

[KeepItSimpleStupid]

TV: You need humor. I was in a restaurant that featured "ORGANIC' food, whatever that is. I asked the "greeter" for the "vegetable in a bottle" and she had no idea what i was talking about.

 

[cowboybob]

Sometimes, ignorance is, indeed, bliss.

And, for the most part, I'm a happy guy... .

 

[tvtech]

Life.. as in the threads title:

Sometimes a rocky road where stuff needs to be thrashed out. No matter the consequences to the person who is prepared to speak. He/ she would not open can's of worms like this if they were not able to deal with the backlash. And this leads to uncomfortable truth's many times. Soul searching and being absolutely straight forward is what many are not accustomed to.
Sometimes a smooth road that leads to bliss.

Normally the smooth road follows the rocky road.

Gotta get the feelings and truth and anger out of the way first. That is what the rocky road does. Kinda cleanses the soul and prepares it for the smooth road to bliss.

Me. I am still still stuck on the rocky road. But I know eventually that the smooth road will follow. Gotta deal with the rocky road first

Regards,
tv

 

[KeepItSimpleStupid]

And sometimes a smooth road means you end up in a ditch. Too slippery.

 

[tvtech]

And sometimes a smooth road means you end up in a ditch. Too slippery.

Wrong tires. Never thought of that

Seriously though. I went all psycho with this thread. Basically lecturing myself now

 

[tvtech]

Sometimes, ignorance is, indeed, bliss.

And, for the most part, I'm a happy guy... .

Never mind me cowboybob. Mostly I am happy too.

Regards,
tv

 

[JimB]

TV
You have one or two "armchair business advisers" here telling you that the solution to your problem is in your own hands, and that is true.
However what they are not doing is giving you that spark of an idea which you can develop in order to take you to a better place.
Finding that spark and working out how it fits into your current situation is the difficult bit. The implementation when you have found the spark is often the easy bit.

My last "spark" which led to a great improvement in my lifestyle went something like this:

JimB at work, despairing of the company management and fed up with his lot as he could easily see ways to make it better. But is isn't going to happen!
Idea! Just leave, have a year off, enough money in the bank to float for a year and a bit.
What to do in the year off, study maybe, better qualifications.
What to do at the end of the year, who knows, who cares.
What did Mrs JimB think? good idea, do it!

Then the thought occurs "Who will take over my work when I am gone?", the quick answer was nobody...
... A business opportunity!
I knew exactly what the costs of the job were, and how much my employer charged to clients, easy to put together a business plan with real costs for in independent supplier to do what I did as an employee.
And the best part about it is, the boss was thrilled with the idea as it removed a fixed cost (me) and made his budget look better to his boss in some far away place.

The outcome:
JimBs former boss is happy,
JimB is very happy.

Some years down the line when JimB declares that he is going to retire, there are one or two glum faces, but they seem to have found a good solution and the phone has not rung in panic, great!

So, TV, you need the spark, I cannot tell you what it is, you must recognise it and be able to act on it.
It may come when two or more unrelated things come together and you see the connection and can make or do something which is a benefit for all concerned.

Did I just write all that?
I must be feeling fillersofical or something.

JimB


PS
Oh, and I never did get my year off. I left the company at the end of December and started sporadically re-appearing to "do my self employed thing" about two weeks later.

 

[DerStrom8]

I feel like this thread is going nowhere and will only lead to more flaming. I am closing it for now until the other moderators and I can discuss what to do with it.

The moderation staff removes any insulting, racist, or otherwise offensive content. I found nothing offensive about tvtech's comments. I don't think he's referring to all Africans as being incompetent, just the ones he works with. If he was being blatantly racist, the comments would be removed without hesitation.

Matt

 

[DerStrom8]

The moderation staff has elected to re-open this thread. That being said, please try to keep it civilized.

Thanks,
Matt

 

[Dr_Doggy]

hey, it could happen!

 

[Pommie]

It's not just techs that don't know what they are doing. I have an acquaintance who is developing a new product and, about 2 years ago, asked me to look at the progress on the project. He is having it developed by some students and they had sent photos of what they had developed so far. I looked at the photos and said, that in my opinion, they are about 10% done. He told me I was completely wrong as they had promised him a prototype the next month. Two years later he is still waiting for his prototype. I could have produced a prototype in about 2 months at probably the same cost as he's paid in two years. I like to call my service "reassuringly expensive" as it won't be cheap but it will be good and on time. It's the old adage of "pay peanuts, get monkeys".

Mike.

 

[tvtech]

TV
You have one or two "armchair business advisers" here telling you that the solution to your problem is in your own hands, and that is true.
However what they are not doing is giving you that spark of an idea which you can develop in order to take you to a better place.
Finding that spark and working out how it fits into your current situation is the difficult bit. The implementation when you have found the spark is often the easy bit.

My last "spark" which led to a great improvement in my lifestyle went something like this:

JimB at work, despairing of the company management and fed up with his lot as he could easily see ways to make it better. But is isn't going to happen!
Idea! Just leave, have a year off, enough money in the bank to float for a year and a bit.
What to do in the year off, study maybe, better qualifications.
What to do at the end of the year, who knows, who cares.
What did Mrs JimB think? good idea, do it!

Then the thought occurs "Who will take over my work when I am gone?", the quick answer was nobody...
... A business opportunity!
I knew exactly what the costs of the job were, and how much my employer charged to clients, easy to put together a business plan with real costs for in independent supplier to do what I did as an employee.
And the best part about it is, the boss was thrilled with the idea as it removed a fixed cost (me) and made his budget look better to his boss in some far away place.

The outcome:
JimBs former boss is happy,
JimB is very happy.

Some years down the line when JimB declares that he is going to retire, there are one or two glum faces, but they seem to have found a good solution and the phone has not rung in panic, great!

So, TV, you need the spark, I cannot tell you what it is, you must recognise it and be able to act on it.
It may come when two or more unrelated things come together and you see the connection and can make or do something which is a benefit for all concerned.

Did I just write all that?
I must be feeling fillersofical or something.

JimB


PS
Oh, and I never did get my year off. I left the company at the end of December and started sporadically re-appearing to "do my self employed thing" about two weeks later.

Hectic Jim. You took the time and trouble with a very long post. Much appreciated.

The spark would be anyone I could share my CRT stuff here with....like absolutely my shortcuts and stuff I have learned over the Years....to make the whole job easier. Stuff you canno't learn about in Technical Books. The things only practicing Tech's know..

A very simple example about saving time.

 

[tvtech]

Carrying on from above ^^

Why remove a Mains Smoothing Cap to test it? If you have 220VAC coming in rectified on a Bridge would be around 320 VDC across the cap...
No need to pull it out and test it. Put your Meter across it. If it is 300VDC+ you are good to go

Less than that toss it. Books do not teach that. Lot's more stuff to teach.

And so on. Thanks Guys for keeping this thread going.

Regards,
tv

 

[killivolt]

I remember when I worked Part-Time in a TV Repair Shop fifteen years ago; I worked there for 10 years. Once a year; and old gentleman came into town Promoting his Electronic Engineer skills; apparently helped design many sets and knew processors how they are built and such. He retired and traveled the country in his motor home.

To earn extra money when he needed it. He would show up to TV Repair shops and say I can fix most of the TV's you haven't been able to repair. The owner said really? He said yes; I'll fix the big sets for $40 and the small for $20 , the only thing I need is bench space, bench equipment and parts typically from used parts boards in the back of the shop. Pretty soon 3 benches had TV's we had ready for him and as he finish one we would put it back together and he would move to the next; we kept stacking them on the finished wall for sets needing a final run over night.

We fed him what he asked for; parts boards or parts; with his MM in hand he worked through them. He would leave the store with better than $500 in hand. He not only corrected the difficult ones; he also corrected the ones yet to be diagnosed which had a previous agreed to price. Some people would say just fix it if this amount or that amount at the counter before they left and sign it off. If they didn't pay we would just sell the set.

Not bad for a days work back then. After that the next day; he would go to the next shop in town and tell them where he came from and do the same thing; we of course would get a call to verify his accomplishments the day before in our shop. We would see him once every 2 years or so.

I didn't know anything then and don't know anything now. What I did know I've forgot. "lol"

( I worked out of the Database in the shop and knew where to look on most sets using that info and the sets I couldn't repair the owner would diagnose. )

kv

Edit: Good to know TV; bout the smoothing cap.

 

[tvtech]

I remember when I worked Part-Time in a TV Repair Shop fifteen years ago; I worked there for 10 years. Once a year; and old gentleman came into town Promoting his Electronic Engineer skills; apparently helped design many sets and knew processors how they are built and such. He retired and traveled the country in his motor home.

To earn extra money when he needed it. He would show up to TV Repair shops and say I can fix most of the TV's you haven't been able to repair. The owner said really? He said yes; I'll fix the big sets for $40 and the small for $20 , the only thing I need is bench space, bench equipment and parts typically from used parts boards in the back of the shop. Pretty soon 3 benches had TV's we had ready for him and as he finish one we would put it back together and he would move to the next; we kept stacking them on the finished wall for sets needing a final run over night.

We fed him what he asked for; parts boards or parts; with his MM in hand he worked through them. He would leave the store with better than $500 in hand. He not only corrected the difficult ones; he also corrected the ones yet to be diagnosed which had a previous agreed to price. Some people would say just fix it if this amount or that amount at the counter before they left and sign it off. If they didn't pay we would just sell the set.

Not bad for a days work back then. After that the next day; he would go to the next shop in town and tell them where he came from and do the same thing; we of course would get a call to verify his accomplishments the day before in our shop. We would see him once every 2 years or so.

I didn't know anything then and don't know anything now. What I did know I've forgot. "lol"

( I worked out of the Database in the shop and knew where to look on most sets using that info and the sets I couldn't repair the owner would diagnose. )

kv

Edit: Good to know TV; bout the smoothing cap.

Thanks for the post KV. I have often thought about doing exactly the same thing as the Tech you mentioned. You get to see your Country and work at the same time. Not stuck in one place.

Definitely something I will consider now that I also need to "get out" a whole lot more. Tired of being stuck in this one place with nothing to do except work. Drink. And visit ETO.

Kinda kills your soul eventually

Thanks Buddy,
tv

 

[DerStrom8]

While we're complaining about coworkers, I may as well tell my story (or stories).

1) Purchasing people have no understanding whatsoever of how the engineering process works

I was given a project at work recently involving a PCB that was designed back in 1999. My job was to prepare it for a new round of production, as we needed about 20 more (they were used for test equipment here at the facility). After reviewing the designs (which was a feat in and of itself--The different designs were scattered all over the company network drives, and some parts were even missing altogether) I realized that we would need to do a major overhaul. About 99% of the components were obsolete, non-RoHS Compliant, or both, and had to be updated. The board design was done in TangoPCB, which is software that the company stopped using many, many years ago, and the schematic only existed in PDF form. All I had was the PDF of the schematic and the PCB gerber files (which were of types we couldn't read with modern software). Now, ideally in this situation the engineer would sit down and redraw the schematic and lay out the board in the modern software (Altium Designer is the standard here) using up-to-date components and current design standards. However, the Purchasing department was in a hurry to get these boards done and didn't want to take too much time. For that reason I was not allowed to redraw the schematic or PCB. They told me to take screenshots of the PDF and paste them into Altium so that we at least had the current company template on the schematic sheet. I didn't like it, but I did what they asked--I added graphics to the "schematic" showing the old schematic, with the outdated components. I added a "Reference Only" note to ensure any future viewers would not use the components listed in the schematic.

Then came the Bill of Materials. For those of you who don't know, the BOM is usually automatically generated (at the click of a button) in Altium based on the schematic and the properties of the components shown. Remember, however, that there is no actual schematic now--just pictures of an old schematic. This meant I would need to take the old Bill of Materials and edit it by hand, updating to the modern components. This board probably had over 1000 parts associated with it, including heat sinks, mounting plates, thermal grease, and SIL pads. This alone took a long time to work through. A couple of weeks later (after asking lots of questions about this board that hadn't been touched since 2001) I sent the designs off to the Documentation department, where they would organize all the designs and send the information to Purchasing. Purchasing had already been on my back about taking too long, so I was very glad to get it over with. However, after submitting the designs to the manufacturer there were literally dozens of questions that came in asking for verification, all of which were caused by a lack of information, which even I was never given. If I had been allowed to do it the right way and redraw the designs using current software, we would not have had an issue. But for some reason, Purchasing thought it would take less time to have me go through it line by line, update it, AND add in information that I got from my crystal ball, rather than to just do it right the first time.

2) What are universities teaching students these days?

One of the guys I work with is a kid (Well, he's in his mid-to-late twenties) with a Masters in EE, but has no idea how a basic PNP transistor works. Furthermore, this guy shouldn't be allowed anywhere near schematic software. He started a project a few months ago and got called away to do something else, so I inherited it. Remember the sticky about how to draw readable schematics? Nearly every one of those rules was broken. There were wires crossing all over the sheet, looped around, designators were at different angles, there were no labels on anything, the component libraries were drawn in a very confusing way, the grid was on its finest setting, making lining up components very difficult, and so on. As a part of that project he was using a hall effect sensor with its output connected to an LED. The sensor was not designed to sink enough current to drive the LED, so I suggested we use a PNP transistor. He proceeds to tell me it won't work to drive an LED because the voltage drop between the emitter and the collector is 1.4v (It should only be a few hundred millivolts, max) and we're connecting to 3.3v. I had to bring him over to a whiteboard to draw the diagram of how a PNP transistor works, and how it needs to be connected in a circuit.

I am a very patient person and I have no qualms with teaching people things they may not understand. I enjoy doing it, and I maintain that learning is one of the most important things anyone can do throughout their lifetime. It goes right along with eating, breathing, and sleeping. But seeing as he has a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering, I wonder what they taught him at school?

See tvtech, you're not alone. Everyone at one point or another is going to be forced to work with incompetent people, and as I'm sure you know it has nothing to do with race. I realize your frustrations are compounded due to poor living conditions and the state of the government where you are.

Matt

 

[KeepItSimpleStupid]

I sort of did that and made great friends in the process. They had an amplifier that just came back because it wasn't repaired properly. I offered to repair it. I took it home, repaired it and that became a nice start of a a nice relationship. I did the hard to repair amps and they handled everything else. Once, I got an amp that 5 shops refused to repair because components "puddled" or melted on the PCB. It was an amp that was borrowed and abused at a disco and it turned into a "repair at any cost". When I received it, the output binding posts were effectively shorted with strands of wire. This was a 500 W amp into 4 ohms.