I bought a rack with plastic bin boxes to hold a bunch of Sheaffer parts the other day.\u00a0 I have a bunch of Sheaffer sections and feeds, and some other stuff that came out of the Sheaffer service center that needed to be sorted and stored so that they can breathe, not in closed plastic bags.\u00a0 Long story there…\u00a0\u00a0 I had to put the rack together, and as I did so my mind wandered a bit (it didn’t require a lot of concentration), and I got to thinking about the crummy instructions.\u00a0 I relied more on the pictures on the box than the instructions or the pictures contained therein.\u00a0 I think that there is a special purgatory for people who write instructions like that…\u00a0 or there ought to be.<\/p>\n
I concluded that if you’re going to buy something from Harbor Freight (AKA the Toy Store) you need to have at least some level of mechanical skill before you start.\u00a0 That<\/em> thought lead me to thinking about a review of a part on the Radio Shack web site.<\/p>\n Before leaving my job of 25 years to repair pens full time, I was a radio engineer.\u00a0 I built a fair number of translators, and\u00a0 3 radio stations, engineering the whole project for WMHQ up on the northern border of NY state.\u00a0\u00a0 I still go out on the odd service call, just to keep myself up to date. Back to Radio Shack (engineering joke: “Radio Shack.\u00a0 You have questions?\u00a0 We have batteries.”)\u00a0 I was on\u00a0 their web site looking for a simple RCA connector, plastic, with solder terminals.\u00a0 I’ve used the things for almost 30 years.\u00a0 Why they have “reviews” of basic parts like this I can’t fathom, but they do.\u00a0 What entertained me though was the whine in a review that “there are no INSTRUCTIONS!”\u00a0 The response in my head was “well, no, there wouldn’t be.”\u00a0 The reason is that there are some things that are very basic, and a certain level of\u00a0 understanding is assumed.\u00a0 Buy a switch or a connector,\u00a0 and chances are that you know how to use it and if you don’t,\u00a0 you know where to find out\u00a0 (this really was a common-as-dirt part).<\/p>\n Do we really have to spoon feed information to the next generation, especially when there is the Internet and the power of search engines to help us?\u00a0 Want to know what the pin out for an Apple iPod connector is, it’s out there.\u00a0 Want to know what the pin out is for a USB connector, and what the standards are for the power supplied?\u00a0 It’s easy to find.\u00a0 Need to know the color code and pin-out for a CAT-5 cable?\u00a0 No problem.\u00a0 So why are we whining about how to use a simple, common, every day, decades-old-design part?<\/p>\n A young man that I know was complaining that everyone in his Physics course got a 76 or below on the most recent test.\u00a0 My <\/em>question was, is it because (as he put it) the instructor didn’t teach the material well enough, or because the student(s) hadn’t even taken the wrapper off of the text book?<\/p>\n Food for thought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I bought a rack with plastic bin boxes to hold a bunch of Sheaffer parts the other day.\u00a0 I have a bunch of Sheaffer sections and feeds, and some other stuff that came out of the Sheaffer service center that needed to be sorted and stored so that they can breathe, not in closed plastic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random-stuff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mainstreetpens.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mainstreetpens.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mainstreetpens.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mainstreetpens.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mainstreetpens.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/mainstreetpens.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mainstreetpens.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mainstreetpens.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mainstreetpens.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nBroadcast engineers joke about the engineering mantra;\u00a0 “If all else<\/em> fails, read the instructions.”\u00a0 I have to admit that to a certain extent that’s true, and we often get away with it.\u00a0 The reason is that by the time you get to work on a transmitter or install a system you usually have a fair bit of experience, and have worked with other engineers over many years.\u00a0\u00a0 Radio engineers specialize in repairing weird stuff. \u00a0 Many of the best ones are self taught. \u00a0 We specialize in walking into what is a baffling situation for everyone else, sorting it out, and making things work, sometimes with little or no documentation to guide us.\u00a0 BUT, as I said before, we also have a lot of experience with the systems that we encounter, or we know who to ask…\u00a0 and we do look for manuals.<\/p>\n