Easy for you to say! I resemble that remark being a poor old Civil and Petroleum and Mechanical Engineer, not necessarily in that order. There was no doubt I did not want to be an Electrical Engineer. What good is it if you can’t hit it with a big hammer?
Where is it written that if you're a EE you can't hit it with a big hammer?
Of course, in IBM field service, we had to call them "impact forming tools."
—”What good is it if you can’t hit it with a big hammer?”
When I was in the Air Force, I was an Airborne Command Post Communications Equipment Repairman.
We had an automatic telephone switching system on the EC-135C Looking Glass and E-4B Nightwatch aircraft. The MUX (multiplexer) rack used with the telephone system had four sections along the bottom with Frame Relay Switching units which consisted of not much more than a bunch of relays crammed into a metal box.
Sometimes the relays got stuck and would not drop out the telephone calls. When this would happen, guess what the inflight checklist’s recommended procedure for unsticking the relays was? Yup, take a big, rubber mallet and give the malfunctioning relay unit a good whack on the front cover!
Most of the time, that was more than enough to unstick the relays.
Of course, there were lots of hard stares and several freakouts from the flight crew and newbie officers whenever they caught sight of me whacking away at the MUX rack with a rubber mallet—especially since the equipment which was used to remotely launch nuclear missiles out of the ground silos was nearby! LOL!
Yup, good times.
Thanks for bringing back the memory.
Cheers