Showing off my flange nibbler
I was doing a little reminiscing this morning.
There’s no law against that so far as I know, but that’s probably just a matter of time.
Anyways, for some unknown reason I remembered a little incident back in my college days.
After leaving school I went on to study electronics. I have absolutely no idea why I should have chosen electronics as a subject as my real passion lay in geography and cartography in particular. But some strange quirk of fate found me studying telecommunications and electronics instead.
So there I was, studying a subject that I had a mere passing interest in. With hindsight I should really have studied computers but they hadn’t really been invented yet so there were no courses in the subject which would have made studying difficult.
The college I was at had an open day each year where parents, friends and the Great Unwashed were invited in to show off what we were at. It wasn’t a particularly popular day as it meant turning up in the lecture halls or the laboratories when we would much prefer to be in the Common Room smoking and playing cards.
On one particular open day myself and Noel [one of my good pals] and myself were teamed up and given an experiment to demonstrate. It was [as far as I remember] a simple oscillator that didn’t do much, but it had the great advantage in that we were given one of the few oscilloscopes which had a screen displaying a little green wavy line. It looked impressive.
Because we were one of the few “experiments” that looked interesting we gathered quite a few who came over to see what we were at. We explained the principles of the oscillator and you could see their eyes glaze over. They hadn’t a fucking clue what we were talking about but then neither did we, so that was fine. But we decided that we needed to glamorise things up a notch so we invented our own spiel. We started explaining to people how we were examining the interaction between grommets and nudgers and producing a little chain reaction on the screen. This went down a lot better with the audience.
There was one old bloke who came over and showed great interest in our “experiment”. He asked all about the flange nibbler and the groover and we explained the Nudgey Reaction in great detail. We were getting quite good at the game and were very inventive. The Old Fart was delighted and went away happy.
As we packed up at the end of the day, our electronics lecturer came over. “Well, lads” said he, “you did a great job today.” Apparently the Old Fart was a sort of secret guest visitor – he was head of engineering at University College Dublin. He had spoken to our lecturer after and had praised our little demonstration saying that he had found us “most interesting and very inventive”.
The Old Fart obviously had a sense of humour.
Thank God.
Many years ago, as one of a group of bored 'work-study men', we were trying to stay awake studying a dull job which had some particularly bizarre terms, each task had a box-file with its study results and, until we'd got enough results for each element, we could carry on taking it easy. So we invented two extra elements, 'Bobbing' and 'Weaving' – whenever the boss asked how we were doing, we claimed to be still short of results for 'Bobbing' or 'Weaving' or both, so the programme would need to carry on longer. That lasted many weeks, our cryptic crossword skills improved dramatically as we filled the days in more creative ways.
As these results were eventually to be discussed/agreed with Shop Stewards, we quietly briefed them and they were delighted to join in the game, asking our boss in minuted meetings for a latest breakdown of 'Bobbing' and 'Weaving' sample results, which he confidently and authoritatively provided from the garbage analysis we had given him. Forty years on, if he's still alive, he is probably still in blissful ignorance of that little work-avoidance scam. Happy irresponsible days.
Do you mean to say that some research projects are actually made up? Good grief! Who would have thunk it?
Grommets and nudgers surely deserve a place in the world of theoretical physics – those quarks and hadrons have had the universe to themselves for too long!
Indeed. I have a sneaking suspicion that CERN adopted some of our terminology.
I don't know about "The world of theoretical physics", but there is definitely a box of assorted grommets in my workshop. And somewhere, I have a length of grommet strip for covering the sharp edge of large holes cut or punched in sheet metal. Not sure about a nudger, though – I normally use a large hammer…
Memories of 50s, 60s BBC comedy. Rambling Sid Rumpo, The Navy Lark with the floggle-toggle, the humgrummit, the twingeing screws, and Professor Stanley Unwin, just in total.
And a story about an American company executive at his firm’s Scottish subsidiary, exasperated by the inability of a Scots technician to complete a task. When informed by a local engineer that that particular engineer will never get the job done because he doesn’t have a scooby, demands that somebody goes out and acquires the necessary scooby.
Some clarification.
The Cockerknees are not the only ones to do rhyming slang. See Trainspotting film. It even gets extended to rhyming slang of rhyming slang and sometimes the intervening rhyming slang gets lost and forgotten about. Leaving an apparently senseless word.
Scooby = Scooby-Doo (well known dog) = clue.
Greetings GD.
I wonder if “The Old Fart” was actually Prof Stanley Unwin, glad in his heart to meet someone of the Sciencelodes? Lisajou patterns? – Deep Joy!
I too studied electronics, back in the day. Now, of course, it’s the electronics that studies you. All your data belong them (to keep you “safe”, don’t you know).
And, word of warning here, don’t ever try to hold those “keeping you safe” to account, or you’ll end up like Mr Assange. (See Craig Murray for the current Kangaroo Court being held in dear old Blighty…)
The timing of my course was excellent – it was just when valves where going out of fashion. So 95% of the course covered the thermionic valve [diodes, triodes, pentodes and the like] and transistors got just a passing mention. Nowadays of course it's all chips so even transistors have had their day.