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Not my mom, but my girlfriends grandmother. I told her that I am a software developer, a guy who makes the programs which run on computers.

She became really excited about that, because finally she found someone to repair her 40-year-old radio. I told her that I have no fucking idea about radios, but she did not want to hear that. So I looked at the case, randomly pushed some buttons and again told her, that I could not find the broken part, let alone repair it. But she didn't listen and told me to open the case and look inside.

Sighingly I opened the radio, looked at the inner parts and told her once more, that I don't know anything about this stuff. She told me to look more closely. About to lose my mind about this pointless task, I finally told her, that "the transistor" is the problem and that the best thing she could do is to throw it away and buy a new radio. She was happy with that answer.

Comments
  • 46
    Rule of thumb with audio devices is to look for a blown capacitor
  • 9
    @ganjaman Thanks for the advice, but I don't even know what a 'capacitor' is nor how to replace it. I really don't have more than the most basic understanding about hardware
  • 20
    @c64forthewin Capacitors are these parts where the angry pixies hide even when the device is switched off and they look like tiny cans laying or standing on the PCB.
  • 2
    so i picture myself in your place, and I ask myself, what am I so pissed off about?

    seems like the years and years of all night work, learning this and that, the bug nobody else encountered, with 1 answer on a forum nobody has visited since 2008, yet somehow that propels you to the right answer, and the adrenaline, and you code on..

    many more sleepless nights of work later, you finally get to where you want to be and you're proud of yourself, you want to share with family, friends.

    Then you get this.
    It's demoralizing.
    I get it.
    Everyone here gets it.
    We might as well be cia, programmers.
  • 0
    @irene Not anymore. Join the Resistance
  • 0
    I'd check the fuse before anything else šŸ˜„
  • 1
  • 0
  • 0
    LinkedIn full of tech-related messaged from recruiters who have no clue what that even means

    A techie doing hardware maintenance and diagnosing "the bad transistor" w/o having an idea what that is

    yepp, it's 2019 allright :D

    P.S. Have you tried to plug it into the mains tho? :)
  • 0
    I kinda was expecting you to have actually found the underlying source of the problem. But, meh.
  • 0
    Ahhh.. Transistor. Fantastic game.

    Go play it right fucking now.
  • 0
    @Lor-inc
    Viva la Enlightened! [game reference]
  • 1
    This always happened with me. My grandfather will always ask me to fix his radio whenever I visited his house.
    I guess, sometimes, they just want us to spend time with them.

    On a technical note, the first step to fix ANYTHING is to turn it OFF and ON.
    Works out most of the time magically.
  • 0
    @lastNick Those angry pixies will fuck you up! šŸ§š‍ā™€ļø
  • 0
    @github it may help to extract some information before turning off though. Eg. I usually check if this is the first session after an update on computers.
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