A Little Knowledge...

I was forwarded a complaint by someone living in the blanket area of one of my client stations. Seems we were 5x9 on their $10 house phone. We constructed a small filter and sent it on to them. A couple of days later, a call was forwarded to me. Seems the wife had been told by the husband that she'd better not install it or she could get killed. According to her, he knew "...a lot about electricity and he noticed that the box had over a thousand volts in it, maybe two thousand." Well, he knew enough about opening a device but, apparently, didn't know much about reading capacitors. Those good old .01 @1000v discs would have done their job but may not get the chance. I tried to explain working voltage but don't know that I got through. It brought to mind the statement, "A Little Knowledge is Dangerous." We've all experienced some of these situations. In the "not so dangerous" category is the jock who decides that he can bring in a bunch of Y adapters and series them up so that 4 people can plug headphones into one board phones output. With luck, a fuse will blow or the chip will shut down and there's not a lot of damage done. Then again, they can get more dangerous - like the guys who want to adjust the audio processor on their own. I have seen some so far "gone" that the only way to correct the problem is to reset to the defaults and start over. One friend once very carefully built a gonculator (with respect to Hogan's Heroes). It had 4 pots and two screwdriver adjustments. He labeled it the (call letters) Audio Processor. It had Belden going in and out. The pots had calibrated scales and there were labels above the screwdriver adjustments...labels like: Male Voice Enhancer Depth, and Sibilance Compression. Others were labeled with even more esoteric names which slip my mind. He installed the box in a rack and put a plexiglas cover on it, held down with screws. Now, although the box wasn't in line and did nothing, it was regularly the object of adjustment. In fact, one jock in particular became irate when another one "misadjusted" the box, screwing up his air voice. It was weeks before my friend finally let them all know what they were - or weren't - doing. Actually, those adjustments did nothing and, therefore, the "little knowledge" had little danger. Then comes this one: The DA is out. The antenna monitor is fine but the monitoring points are off. After you examine and cross examine, someone, maybe even the GM, fesses up. The monitor was reading wrong and the started cranking till they got it close. Out at the tower, you replace the toroid with the shorted turn, return the phasor coils to their Sharpie positions and, son of a gun, it's back in tolerance. I don't need to go on. You can all add others - most probably more traumatic than these. Question is, how do you convince folks to call first? If you have the answer, open an office and just sell that answer. You'll make millions.