Products > Test Equipment
Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
bd139:
Yeah that idea falls on it’s arse when you suddenly decide that the best course of action is being a small player and entering the market as the lowest bidder. The only outcome you get then is you hire some dude who was recently fired from Maccy Dees for being toasted on duty because he will work for pittance which keeps your margins down.
I worked for, well dig out of the shit, an IT company in 2002 and they used that model. The most qualified person on their road based support team was a salad packer for three years before that. And when I started he quit to go and work picking onions because it didn’t require as much brain work. He didn’t actually understand that picking onions wasn’t a full time all year round job. You can imagine what the guy did when he touched a computer.
tggzzz:
--- Quote from: bd139 on May 01, 2018, 10:12:56 pm ---Not so sure. I spoke to one guy at a company and said “I’ve got a Hewlett Packard 3478A” and he asked me right away if it was a “fluke tester” or not. |O
--- End quote ---
It is worth distinguishing between relatively untrained front-office staff and hopefully well trained back-office staff.
I've had a (very nice) new hire at RS fail to understand the question I was asking, until I persisted. I have no idea about the quality of the back-office staff since the quote was too high.
Cerebus:
A "fluke tester" - a device designed to check whether, by a fluke, a British elec-chicken has managed to wire up something correctly.
The relatively recent improvements in the IEE wiring regulations have forced the average electrician to actually own and use a range of test equipment that used to be almost unheard of in electrical contracting. Along with that has come a requirement to have the same checked for proper operation on a regular basis - more PASS/GO testing than what we'd regard as a proper calibration. That in turn has led to demand for testing services that do little more than run the 'fluke tester' against a simple calibration setup and churn out the paperwork to prove that the 'tester' has itself been tested. Mention something like 'test uncertainty' to the monkeys who run these businesses and you can see their eyes glaze over. They are there to mechanically follow the procedure, generate the paperwork that proves that your 'fluke tester' is still working properly, and take your money.
Many years ago I used to earn a few extra quid working as an Electrician's Mate for my mate Tony, a fully fledged and NICEIC qualified Electrician (a rarity in those days). We regularly worked on site where there were other electricians around and they are dumbfounded when Tony used to pull his earth loop impedance tester out. Most of them recognised a Megger, but only perhaps 30% of them regularly brought one along on a job with them. We'd often be there for Tony to produce an NICEIC inspection certificate on the work that the 'monkey grade' elec-chickens had carried out. Sometimes we were there to inspect electrical work that builders who were too cheap or too arrogant to employ a proper electrician had carried out themselves - therein lies some horror stories.
Edited: about four times because I don't appear to be able to spell or use grammar properly today.
Specmaster:
All of these examples just reinforce my statement about the countries industry etc getting complacent, You can't blame the people working their for the inability to do the job, its the owners and senior management complacency because they clearly do not comprehend the nature of the business that they are in and what it's job specifics actually are and what skills are required to fulfill the role satisfactorily and thus enhance the companies name and reputation. All they can think about is how can they save money by cutting corners at every juncture and hope and pray that nothing goes wrong big time for them and when the shit does eventually hit the shovel they tend to fall back one of 2 things !) its out of the warranty period and 2) How do we know that you didn't do that yourself, the latter was something that my old boss used to say all the time and bury his head in the sand and hope the problem went away. Which it did when the customer took his business somewhere else and maybe a few other with him when they get talking as they do at the water cooler.
Neomys Sapiens:
--- Quote from: bd139 on May 01, 2018, 10:12:56 pm ---Not so sure. I spoke to one guy at a company and said “I’ve got a Hewlett Packard 3478A” and he asked me right away if it was a “fluke tester” or not. |O
--- End quote ---
It is. You can test/verify most Flukes with it.
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