🚀 go-pugleaf

   The recent posting about the klutz and his adventures with the VAX
and static electricity brings to mind something that (almost) happened
to me a couple summers ago when I was doing PC repair for IBM...
   When I first started, I asked the permanent employees, "What happens
if you put something in wrong? Does it go up in smoke?" and they all
said, "Nah. It just doesn't work."
   Well, after a couple months of working there, I had come to see that
this was actually true. TTL is pretty tough. I didn't make mistakes very
often, but when I did the machine just sat there and refused to work. No
big deal.
   One day, I got a call to replace a hard drive. I ordered the part.
Then a whole bunch more calls came in and I didn't have time to do the
first one, so I gave the new drive to somebody else to install. Didn't
think anything more of it.
   A couple hours later he walked into the office with a weird look on
his face. He pulled out the new drive and there was a big black spot on
the circuit board where a resistor had blown itself into little
carbonized bits. This, of course, was the same guy who had told me that
things don't go up in smoke...

-- 
James W. Birdsall  jwbi...@phoenix.Princeton.EDU  jwbirdsa@pucc.BITNET
   ...allegra!princeton!phoenix!jwbirdsa   Compu$erve: 71261,1731
"For it is the doom of men that they forget." -- Merlin