the client is satisfied with a reverb-less two channel amp
Now this is where job sheets or job reports start to become important, for a couple of reasons.
Firstly they help you track gear that has a generic fault - "saaaay, that's the third time this has come in for cooked OP bottles this year" ... leads to an intermittent bias set pot you hadn't even suspected.
Another important function is protecting you from "chancers".
Had a guy turn up at the workshop door, tweenage son in tow clutching a ghetto blaster. "He found it in the rubbish, only wants the FM radio going". Just as well because the cassette tape deck looked rooted, worn to death.
About four months later he turns up with the item complaining that the cassette deck doesn't work and wanting it fixed for free under warrantee. (keeping in mind that I am obviously not Megabuck Industries and am operating as a one-man-band from my home).
"Hang on, just let me check the job sheet..."
Then it starts "Don't you stand by your work? You fixed it and now it's busted again so you obviously didn't do a very good job blahblahbaah".
I finally get the job sheet up and read him the client instruction: "ex-tip, only FM radio, not cassette repair (impossible anyway)". He had already given me a runaround so I told him he had had $80 worth of technician time for $40 and should quit while he was ahead. He just grumphed and stomped off, his try-on having failed, no apology. I hate to think how his son will turn out.
This guy was a serious case and fairly well known for his antics, but a job sheet is also your safeguard against simple misunderstanding and forgetfulness.
"But I thought you changed the output valves?"
"No, it says here next time 'coz you can't afford it this time".
They are just simple text files in a folder called "JOBS20yy";
<filename: make model serial.txt>
Date: (yymmdd)(+nnn job number that day if there is a chance of confusion)
Make:
Model:
S/No:
Owner:
Address:
Phn:
Report:
(what you found, what you did)
Parts:
Time:
Total:
{boilerplate terms and conditions if required}
Rule One: You Won't Remember. Three months down the track the owner will bowl up and say "You remember that X you fixed for me?", and nine time out of ten I can honestly reply "No, did I?". Unless a repair has something outstanding or significant about it, you simply won't remember yet another "replace OP tubes and rebias", or some other trivial repair. This is where a good job sheet can help both you and the client.
Had a rack mount stereo PA amp come in with a blown fuse on one side, no other fault found. Some months later it comes back with the same fault, except on checking with the job sheet it's now on the
other channel, and again no other fault. Huh? What's going on here then?
"Bring me all your PA speaker leads". Sure enough one had twisted inside the connector and was occasionally shorting, the first time it had been on the A-channel, the second on the B-channel. It's easy to see how this could have turned into a reputation-damaging saga of recurrent returns without the actual fault being found, and how the job sheet nailed the suspicion that the second failure was on the other side, which made me look elsewhere.
Rule Two: You Never Record What You Later Need, or Murphy's Law of job records. I scribble notes, voltages, etc., on scraps of paper at the bench (with the date and job ID) and use and transcribe these later into the actual job sheet, e.g. "B+=286V, Pout 47W". Since these are basically letters to yourself later you need to think what you will want to know when coming back to it down time somewhere.
My dislike for drudge paperwork reordering parts comes second only to my dislike of accounting, but some is required, so using my head to save my posterior I composed order forms in a spreadsheet for my suppliers that looked like theirs and were self-calculating. Just print that out and post it (or these days just post the order to their site).
A free and very functional spreadsheet (etc) is
Apache OpenOffice.
the big question here is who should bear the responsibility, joe schmo or 'Big Ag,' which consumes 80% of our water
Reading the MSM, blogs, &c, (i.e. through a glass darkly) it seems that California has yet to deal with questions that were resolved here decades ago. People don't like to change proven methods and farmers and industry will fight back against restrictions, being asked to do more with less.
It took years to convince fruit farmers along the Murray that flood irrigation was unsustainable, and that investment in drip-feed systems was essential, but eventually they did. My current fear is that it's eleven-thirty for California and you don't have "eventually".
Then I see how some Americans seem to knee-jerk react to being told what to do by government - even when it is obviously the right thing to do. "Mah Freedomz!"
One long hard lesson over my lifetime has been
timely reaction to an emerging drought. When I was a teenager people just went on watering their thirsty European gardens and praying for rain, and restrictions were introduced too late to help much unless they were draconian.
We now have three Stages of water restriction and some places, such as where I live West of Melbourne, have permanent Stage-1 restrictions, no unattended lawn sprinklers for example, only hand garden watering allowed.
Well man this is what I'd call running on empty, a "Stage-4 - evacuate now" situation. Well past putting a brick or two in your toilet cistern.
As I see it you have two forces, individualistic/anti-regulation/sectional self-interest; and you have a community that want to survive, and you will only survive if communitarianism trumps individualism. The thing is with water, when it runs out we
all run out.
This is the Climate Change problem in microcosm, we can all take a small regulatory hit now, or we can go for broke now and take a draconian regulatory hit down the track.
I have a small tank, came with the place, and between droughts it means I don't have to pay for garden water, and in drought times it keep my fruit trees going (and forget the rest). So get a tank, even having 1000L makes a difference.
And you can get creative;
Recent Posts