Mark Willis wrote:
>   Real tech's use a thumbnail for wire stripping - any dentist will tell
> you, teeth shouldn't be used for wire stripping.  LOL!

... using teeth, and after half hour stripping a 500 pair phone cable,
the real tech would be chewing a huge ball of wire insulation,
multi-color, all that nice plastic taste, like a real pro that never
spits it out. :)

... after few months of that work, the real tech would not have a 6-pack
for the saturday afternoon games on TV, instead a nice 4 feet of the
same 500 pair cable... what a rush!  stripping one inch per second. :)

... he develops a inauspicious ability to test 9V batteries in the
tongue, and his Fluke multimeter has a nice piece of AWG#14 wire in
place of the 100mA fuse.

... transformer temperature measurement with a thermocouple? nahhh, it
goes by sound, by the humming.

... transistor pinout in a pocket book drawing? nahhh, plug it one way,
than another, until it works.

... scotch tape never hurts when insulating 400Vac connectors.

... lacking soldering iron? no problem, heating a nail with a lighter
solved several problems.

... carbonized resistor? can't read the value? no problem, nothing that
a 10k resistor can't solve.

... a real tech is a master, a real magician in the field, his mind and
fingers are slick as a fast snake in the jungle, he sees a solution much
before the customer sees the problem, he saves the world every 10
minutes, and he sleeps like a baby at night.  His workstation is full of
electronic components here and there, mixed with lots of diskettes and
paper, nobody knows how can he find anything there, but he does.  He has
a little tinny empty space on the table, 4 x 3 inches, right in front
the keyboard, where he uses to do hand writing. The company's president
knows him by his first name, and he addresses the president as "buddy".
His world is a jungle, and he likes it that way, a place where a poor
engineer can not survive.

... but he will never be able to buy Armani.

Wagner