Good stories. Yep, Bill, your buddy was right - it's just a big Ranger... funny stuff.
On the downside - after a while, I would occasionally overhear a tech getting axed by the mgr, "what's the problem - can you fix it or not?" I sometimes heard, " give it to Tom."
One day that was my Waterloo. The Motorola Pulsar radiotelephone just came out. It was a disco duck circuit board filled with early LSI chips and digital readout stuff. I studied the filmstrip training and read the manuals first. This unit was a reject nobody wanted to even attempt after one guy gave up. Within the first 10 minutes I got into it I shorted out the freq readout - blank. After another few minutes the unit wouldn't even light up - dead! I was mortified. It had to be sent back to the factory. Boy was that humbling.
I saw the handwriting on the wall and left that occupation a few months later for a sales job. Never regretted moving on. As we all know, the digital age sure changed a lot of things and many 2-way shops eventually closed down as time went on.
T
