Skylab, engineering deadpan, and the old "knowing where to put the X joke"

Vaughn Simon wrote:

On 8/15/2016 7:54 PM, Jeff Findley wrote:
Percussive maintenance. Sometimes you really do want to hit it to fix
it.

Back in the tube days, it's amazing how often that worked.


It wasn't just the tube days. We used to do this to the digital sonar
I worked on in the military. The backplane of the card racks was all
these little fine wires. Over time they would develop 'opens' and
things would stop working. When you didn't have time to actually go
in there and redo the wirewrap on the backplane, you could frequently
'fix' things temporarily by pulling the chassis out and slamming it
back in.

I really upset a junior technician by doing this when we absolutely
had to get the thing back up and operating 'now'. "Why did they spend
a quarter of a million dollars training me if you're going to do
that?"


--
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable
man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore,
all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
--George Bernard Shaw