Today, I spent a good portion of the day teaching and troubleshooting. I rather enjoy both of them but boy can they be a lot of work. Not physically so much as mentally. When I was younger, I remember thinking about how the senior guys would just spend all day looking at diagrams or showing other people how to do the work that they rightfully should be doing themselves. Here I was taking care of the physical labor of the job while they sat, talked, enjoyed their coffee and so on. Now, I’m sure that several of them really were just trying to dodge work but I now know that more than a few of them really were doing work that was much harder than moving boxes, filling sandbags or taking out the trash.
Early on, I chose a career as a maintenance technician. You could easily approach the job in one of three ways. The first way was what we call a shotgun troubleshooter. You simply keep changing parts until the machine in question starts to work. No need to worry about prints, theory or anything else that really told you how to figure out what was wrong. Eventually, you would find the broken part and the device would light up and pass all the tests that were required. The second way was simply to change out what someone else told you to change. A senior technician (or rather someone who knew how to troubleshoot) would figure out what the problem was and then turn the unskilled portion of the job over to someone else to change out the part. He (or she as women tend to be pretty good t/s) would then move onto the next problem. The third person of course is the one that would figure out what was wrong and took pride in the fact that they only needed to change one or two parts to get to the finish line. I was in the latter group.
I enjoyed figuring out what was wrong with something and the satisfaction of getting a piece of equipment to work. In all honestly, it wasn’t long before the additional duties stopped and I was left alone to do my work. My supervisors knew that I would keep working at a problem until I figured it out. If I couldn’t then the problem was usually pretty big. Not much has really changed since that time in my life. I’m still a T/S and will still tinker with things until I figure them out. Actually, one of the odd things about my brain is that I don’t really see my skill set as professional or something that could transfer to something at home. When I’m faced with something being broken, more often than not I’m more interested in calling a ‘professional’ then trying to figure out the issue myself. It’s like I am two people. The person that goes to work and the person that comes home. A funny little quirk about myself I really don’t understand.
The last ten or so years I’ve really started to move into another direction and add teaching to my skill-set. Going back to that funny quirk about me above, another thing related to that is the fact that I firmly believe that anything I figure out others can too. I’ve never seen myself as a particularly intelligent person. I’m average to slightly above average. I just happened to have a few good teachers that really took an interest in showing me how to figure things out. To continue with this line of thought, I’ve always taken an interest in figuring out how to pass this information onto others and give them the tools that will allow them to recall it at a later date. Today, that’s a major part of my job and I really love to teach.
My student today has no background in electronics. I really had to take him to the beginning and explain current, voltage, electricity, electronics, etc. Last week we were working on how to properly measure current and voltage (I like to do a little of the practical first so that when we talk theory it really makes a bit more sense). The best part of this is when I see the excitement and interest in the students eyes as he sees how this information I’m giving him has bearing to what he needs to do with his job. The excitement is contangious and really drives me forward. Of course, that also makes me a rather tired person when I get home…certainly more so than I was when filling sand-bags. Life really does go full-circle and I smile when I think about those people who are looking at me figuring I’m dodging work and many years down the road realize that no, the works just as hard…and coffee is good 🙂
-Talk Laters…
Stevie you have always been a good problem solver and as you have found out I’m sure no all people have that gift. You don’t give yourself enough credit what you do takes not only skill, intelligence and common sense which you have all. You have taught yourself what your education did not and you still have that craving to learn more and you are passing it on to your students if they want it. I am very happy and excited to see your post everyday. I love you and miss you so much. Love Mom