Deja Vu: My first job after graduating college was for Hughes Aircraft Tech Manuals. It was almost the end of my career. But fortunately I was laid-off in the great engineering purge of spring 1971. For years a recurring nightmare was that I was back working at "TM".
I actually did learn a little about writing procedures that was a help many years later. I mostly wrote fault-isolation trees and procedures. Hughes was fond of handing you a schematic with no title and no idea of what the function was, and asking for a troubleshooting procedure. I pity the poor swabs that had to read and follow them. I did once hear back the they took the manual and tore out the schematics and tossed the rest of the manual. I was lucky - I got canned. That led to a job in microwave engineering with NASA. Ten years later I walked out of that career and moved to Alaska without a job, lived in a bare cabin in the woods, bought some sled dogs, and loved it...never looked back. Ten years of that and I got back into the working world, for the last 20-years. 73, Ed - KL7UW On 6/25/2011 8:16 AM, Tony Estep wrote: > Ah, I was once a manual writer. I ran out of money while going to college > and took a job writing manuals for a small engineering firm that made > transistor testers for Texas Instruments. Later, after I went back and > finished school, I was looking for a job and applied at a big electronics > company in St. Louis. The guy who interviewed me informed me that most of > the applicants had submitted writing samples that were unintelligible, and > the few whose writing passed muster couldn't figure out how the equipment > worked, so they didn't know what to say. He unrolled a huge, blue-line, > hand-drawn schematic and pointed to one of the stages. "What's that?" he > demanded. "Schmitt trigger," sez I. Whereupon he jumped up and began > gleefully pumping my hand. "Hooray!" > > But after I got home and thought about it, I realized that the last thing in > the world I wanted to do was to write those manuals, and I wound up going in > a completely opposite direction. > > Tony KT0NY 73, Ed - KL7UW, WD2XSH/45 ====================================== BP40IQ 500 KHz - 10-GHz www.kl7uw.com EME: 50-1.1kw?, 144-1.4kw, 432-100w, 1296-60w, 3400-? DUBUS Magazine USA Rep [email protected] ====================================== ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:[email protected] This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
