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| Karl "Toys" Landwehr | 10/23/98 2:47 pm | 16 | 0 | |
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| During my short term gig as a music store bench tech I had two memorable encounters. The first was harmless. The owner of a small studio brought his ADAT in complaining that the tapes wouldn't go in. After removing the top on the unit I called him back and asked if he had any small childen. First he said no, then after thinking a minute he remembered his nephew visiting the studio. I then informed him that he needs to show his nephew the difference between an ADAT tape and a roll of electrical tape. The second was not so harmless. A high school studentbrought in a blown PA amp I fixed it, tested it, and sent it out. After the next weekend it came back with the same problem. I asked how the amp was being used. The customer said he was running a bi-amped PA system. I asked if the amp was for the hi's or the lo's. He gave me a blank look and told me that he thought bi-amping meant running the outputs of one amp to the inputs of the next. | ||||
| Jonathan | 10/25/98 8:40 pm | 12 | 0 | |
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| Living in a small city of Brazil, some some day a guy brought to me a tape deck to mend. He sad: Seems that the motor of the tape is not working. After opening the tape, I could realize that the guy has put lubrificant oil inside that. The sheaves was all slinding. After a galon of isoprophylic alchool I could mend the tape deck. | ||||
| mark norwine | 10/27/98 7:18 pm | 20 | 0 | |
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| I absolutly swear that this is true! I apologize in advance for the off-color aspect of this, but I simply had to tell it...
A fellow came into my shop complaining of problems with his amp. Long story short, we traced the problem to his guitar cord. "So the solder connection where the cord connects to the jack is bad?", he asked? I responded in the afirmative, but pointed out that, technically, it's called a "plug"....the jack is the "female" part found on the amp. He insisted that the guitar cord ends were the "jacks", and it looked like i was going to have to give this fellow a lesson on the birds & the bees! As I tried to explain the "male" - "female" analogies of audio connectors, he offered up his justification for his misuse of the terms.... "Yes, I know the cord has the male connector....and isn't it the male who e-JACK-u-lates?" I quietly resoldered his cord & sent him on his way. | ||||
| D. Stork | 11/5/98 2:07 pm | 12 | 0 | |
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| Guy calls me up and wants to know if I can hot-rod his Peavey Pacer practice amp. When I tell him that it's not really worth the money to do so, he asks, "Well, can you hot-rod a Marshall stack?"
"Sure," I tell him. "What model is it, and what do you want it to do?" "Not sure about the model," he says, "but don't you tech guys have your own standard tricks that you like to do to Marshalls?" "I suppose so." I said. "But the kind of mod really depends on the model and what you want it to do, specifically. What do you have in mind?" "Can you add light bulbs to the speaker cabinet that flash whenever I hit a chord?" Sheesh... On another topic, have you ever noticed that the more time a potential customer spends picking your brain on the phone or via email, the less likely he is to actually follow up on it and bring in his amp? You know the kind: he'll call you twice a day to discuss every minute detail of the vintage Fender restoration he wants you to perform, he'll say he's coming in "soon", and he never appears. I call this Stork's law of diminishing returns. | ||||
| DStork | 11/5/98 2:20 pm | 19 | 0 | |
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| Some variations on the old "Doctor, it hurts when I do this..." complaint:
"It blows the circuit breaker when I turn it on and off and on again quickly." "The lead channel crackles when I flex the circuit board." "Volume drops when I plug a 4-ohm cabinet into the 16-ohm output." "Feeds back when I turn up treble and presence and stand next to the amp." | ||||
| DStork | 11/5/98 2:26 pm | 29 | 0 | |
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| My first full-time gig in the repair business was working for a repair shop owner who, besides having no technical knowledge, turned out to be not the most ethical guy in the world. Among other things, he liked to "pad" invoices, tacking on extra parts and extra time and hoping the customer wouldn't notice. I realized what was going on when I happened to see the invoice for a circa '66 blackface Fender Twin I'd repaired. In addition to the parts that were actually used in the repair, there was a charge for quantity 5 of DIP-8 dual opamps. (TL072 or 4558... I forget which). Under the labor entry, it said "Replaced all defective ICs."
I left the shop not too long after that, and the place was out of business within a year. | ||||
| Keith Saxon | 11/13/98 1:07 pm | 138 | 0 | |
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| I worked for a while in domestic electronics for a Hitachi dealer. We got a delivery of cruddy Hitachi(I think) electric organs. We goofed around with them for a bit then got bored with them, as we had to screw 4 wooden legs into the base of each organ.
One day we get a panicky phonecall from a Hitachi sales guy who screams down the phone "for god's sake don't send any organs out - theres a misprint in the manual." We looked all through the manual and found this: "When installing, take hold of legs, and fuck them into the hole in the under cabinet" Interesting Japanese variant on the word 'screw'? eh? | ||||
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