[BC] Brain Dead Engineers

[Barry Mishkind]

At 09:45 AM 4/3/2010, mrfixit at min.midco.net wrote:
>    A co-worker occasionally refers to me as the "master of misplacement".
>    ..wonder what makes him say that...

>Dave

        I've told this story a few times, but the word
         misplacement makes it appropos

        A decade or so ago, I was contracted to do the
        RF for a station. However, it seemed like once
        a week I would get a call for something the
        studio engineer couldn't begin to fathom.

        One such call related to the owner's personal
        program, brought in on Ku each weekend night.

        It seems he was listening on the "snoopline" and
        couldn't hear himself. He was screaming and yelling
        and the ops manager begged me to take a look.

        The first two trips yielded nothing. All seemed to
        be fine. The third trip happened while the issue
        was ongoing .. and his voice was indeed "way down."

        Seeing an "extra" pot open, I discovered there was both 
        a link directly from the satellite and one through the
         automation.

        As you may have guessed, investigation eventually showed
        that one of the two lines was wired out of phase.

        Further investigation showed that the engineer, who had
        used the black lead on all the + terminals (!) had still
        managed to flip the phase on several other inputs.

        Let's just say the stereo signal was much better after
        a few wires were pulled and reset. And I went back to
        my RF work ... for a few days, anyway, until the next
        boneheaded deal appeared. I'll leave that for another
        post - to give some others a chance to talk about
        defeated interlocks and other real dangerous stuff.

        b

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