General > General Technical Chat
Most embarrassing junior tech moment? Go!
Halcyon:
--- Quote from: TERRA Operative on May 12, 2023, 12:25:45 pm ---The guy I was working with wasn't wearing gloves, which I warned him about but because the acid didn't immediately burn, he dismissed my warnings and said he's fine. :popcorn:
Well..... the next day... his hands looked like they had been underwater for a week and the top layer of skin was sloughing off.
Dude basically gave himself an epic chemical exfoliation. :palm:
He wore gloves religiously after that. I bet his hands were sensitive for aaageess :-DD
--- End quote ---
I did something similar with flux cleaner. Thought "she'll be right" until about a day later my hands started to go puffy and pretty bad blisters formed. I also must have touched my face at some point (after washing my hands) as around my eyes were puffy as well.
Always wore nitrile gloves after that when cleaning electronics. Not sure how bad flux cleaner is normally for skin, but I have particularly sensitive skin.
bookaboo:
Spending well over an hour soldering a 40-pin Lemo connector then realising I'd forgotten the sealing gland.
TERRA Operative:
I feel that one..
A lot of welders use the circular Amphenol Military style connectors for control signals.
You soon learn to double check you have everything in its place before soldering. :D
mfro:
Not an embarassing, but definitely a distinctive junior tech experience:
in the outgoing 80ies, when I finished my engineering degree (as an automotive engineer), I started my career as CAD consultant at Control Data. In my very first week (literally my second day), they sat me into a plane to Turkey to hold a CAD training at a Turkish university. Had done the same at home as an intern previously, but this was my very first business trip abroad and my very first training to be held in English language (which obviously isn't my mother tongue). Besides that, the number of words I knew in Turkish was about five or six with no Google translate or Siri at hand as both still had to be invented. You probably can imagine that I started the trip with some mixed feelings...
Anyway, I started to gain some self-confidence as the first day went relatively smooth, training went better than expected (with a lot of nice help from the students that were really eager to learn), only interrupted by several intermittent power cuts while we needed to wait for the mini (I think it was a Cyber 930) to come up again. However, during the following night, there apparently was another power cut and that obviously was one too much for the poor 930 : it refused to come up again.
I didn't have any experience in hardware, neither had seen a 930 in flesh before nor knew any but the most basic NOS/VE commands to bring the CAD system up, but my students looked at me full of expectations since, after all, I was the CDC expert :-// . With no mobiles, not even a fixed line at their "data center" besides the ultra-modern single phone link that was used for the 930 to call home (which it couldn't since that only worked after it came up), it obviously was my task now to do that (CDC didn't have any mini-capable local services as it was allowed to import such high-tech as the 930 into Turkey only just recently).
Remember: no mobiles, no Internet, no Google, not even a camera to take a picture of the cryptic console messages the sick 930 spit out.
Anyway, with the really nice help of the students, an improvised phone line to the console (a cable running cross-buildings through about half of the campus), my CDC colleagues at the phone remote-controlling my hands, a soldering iron (to repair a broken connector of the replacement disk unit they had which was my very first soldering job) we eventually managed to fix the 930 and bring it up again and lost only like six hours.
My first week as a CAD consultant.
nctnico:
I quickly learned that I'm always right >:D
Senior engineer had put two electrolytics in series to achieve higher voltage rating. When I made a remark about that not being a good idea, he claimed it would work. When I took the system (high 6 figure number worth of equipment) to the customer (a bank), the electrolytics blew with a large puff of smoke in their equipment room during testing. And ofcourse this happened right when the manager from the bank overseeing the project had taken his supervisors to the equipment room to show progress. Needless to say I turned a bit pale... No, I vividly remember wanting to crawl under the raised floor. It wasn't my mistake but I felt 1000% responsible.
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