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Most embarrassing junior tech moment? Go!

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temperance:
Not really a technical failure but one I will never forget.

It's my first day at a new job. I share a desk with a colleague and my colleague has a radio. At 10h30 they announce the new candidates for the daily music quiz on the radio and one of the candidates has this unusual name which, translated into English, would be something like Mr. The Fucker. So I comment on that and said: if I had a name like that I would think about changing my last name. My new colleague raises his head above the console between my desk and his desks and asks me: can you guess my last name?... The only thing I could say after a few seconds was: yes, I think I can.

@nctnico
An other colleague of mine still thinks I was thinking about trying to kill him after I installed a rather large capacitor backwards. But that's typically me. Focusing on the getting the circuit and values right and installing things backwards.

madires:
PVD without vacuum:
A contractor was working on a DC power distribution rack which feeds one aisle in a data center. That rack was powered via two pairs of thick wires going directly to large battery and PSU banks, classic -48V system. While fastening a terminal screw with a wrench he managed to create a nice short. Boom! He was pushed back a few meters, but luckily sustained no injuries. The inside of the rack was covered by a metal film, and the door's glass window too - the wrench has been literally vaporised.

jonpaul:


KE5FX: >>>>Amazing that you were able to recover from that in one night.   Was that the HP 5451A?>>>>


Yes, I know that HP spec an system, anso waired at Federal Scientific and knew Nicloet, and Spectral Dynamics. 

Ours  was   the first FFT real time with a custom Nova 800 and huge PC boards.

  1024 pts in 1 mS.

Rackmount  by a division of a French firm  for ESRO, European Space Agency for vibration analysis.

I have the original phoos and info in my archives...

Enjoy,


Jon

chukin:
My personal moment of ultimate negative glory occurred when I was a physics doctoral student in the eighties in London. My supervisor and I were trying to simulate far-IR absorption in the atmosphere under conditions of UV-stimulation using a decidedly low-tech setup – a copper sphere irradiated with a high-pressure Hg lamp on one side (to provide UV and FIR radiation) and a Golay detector on the other to detect the FIR absorption. To fire up the mercury lamp we used a Tesla coil that gave a spark about an inch long. Never had a problem….
Well, we collaborated with a group in the UK’s premier radio and signals research institute (no names, no pack drill…) who one day generously lent us the use of a brand new IMPATT* diode which produced lots of millimeter wave energy, ideal for the absorption measurement. No one told me, the callow student dogsbody, that a) IMPATT diodes were the latest thing in mm-wave sources and therefore horrendously expensive, and b) ESD sensitive.
So when I fired up the mercury lamp with the Tesla coil the spark instantly killed about 8000 quid’s worth of diode…..
They were very good about it – I didn’t get fired, or even beaten around the head with a Tesla coil.
*IMPATT = Impact Avalanche Transition Time

Peter

Stromlo:
Did a prototype design that had 6 boards daisy-chained with comms/power, on separate connectors. Not different connectors, just separate. Power was 12VDC. A friend came over and I wanted to show him that it works. I put the comms in the power socket, and vice versa. I will never forget what that looked like! 6 identical PCBs, with 6 MCUs all glowing and smoking at the same time.

The client demo was less than a week away, and those were the only prototypes.  |O

I've never made that design mistake again!

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