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Had a chat with a new hire that made me miss the old test gear
Honestly, I was showing a kid fresh out of school how to run a built-in test on a comms box last week. He was flying through the menus on the MFD, no sweat. Then he asked me, 'What did you guys even do before all this?' I told him about the old rack of dedicated test sets we'd wheel over, with the real needles and knobs you had to turn by hand. He just shrugged and said, 'Sounds like a lot of extra work.' Tbh, it was, but you really felt like you were talking to the box, you know? You heard the relays click, saw the needle swing. Now it's all green pass/fail screens. I get that it's faster and you need less training, but something about the feel of the job is gone. Anyone else get a bit sad when they think about the hands-on stuff we lost?
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angela_harris3mo ago
You ever try to explain the smell of hot electronics and old paper manuals to someone who's only known PDFs? That kid's not wrong about it being extra work, but you're right about the feel. I found the best way is to pull an old unit out of storage if you can, even if it's broken. Let him put his hands on the knobs and hear that click. It doesn't change the job now, but it connects the dots. Makes that green screen mean a little more.
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rubyk263mo ago
Totally get what you mean about the hands-on thing! My nephew thought I was nuts until I dug out my old, chunky graphing calculator from high school. Letting him press the stiff buttons and see that tiny screen light up changed his whole view. He finally understood why I kept talking about the physical feel of tech. That clicky keyboard sound is something a touchscreen just can't give you.
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michael6691mo ago
The old Tektronix 7000 series scope we had in our bay weighed like 80 pounds and you had to dial in the timebase manually or you'd get this garbage waveform that looked like a face lol. @ray_martinez82 i get your point about human error, but sometimes that "wasted time" was what taught you to really listen to the gear. When that needle hovered just past the green zone on a power supply test and you knew to tap the relay to get it seated, that wasn't inefficiency, that was knowing your equipment. Now if the green screen says pass and you get a weird glitch later, you got nothing to go on but a error code. The feel was part of the diagnostic process, not just extra steps.
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ray_martinez823mo ago
That extra work was just wasted time and human error. The new gear gets the same job done faster and safer.
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