G'Day from a fellow ex Tandy repairman
I joined Tandy almost right out of high school in 1980.
I had learned basic electronics at school with a bit more in depth stuff because my physics teacher was a ham and the school had an active amateur radio club. My parents had bough me a 50in1 and I did the same with my pocket money and bought the same meter
It was still known as Tandy then, not Interntan , that would come later.
I got the job over another chap who had gone to uni because even though he had all the theory, he couldn't solder for shit!
Soldering and desoldering components was a good 1/2hr+ of the interview. The manager also pulled many schematics and pointed at various parts and asked me what they were and/or questions like... "What voltage would you expect at this point?"
I suspect, that being a 17yo, I was pretty cheap to hire too!
It was an education. As a repairman you were expected to fix any thing in the product line in 45 minutes. It didn't matter if it was a radio control car, a 3in1 stereo or a communications receiver like the DX160 - 45 minutes was it. DX300 was a nightmare to repair and align often taking a couple of hours!!!
Needles to say you got to know things intimately and my knowledge increased at a rapid rate. The pressure was relieved somewhat when items developed common faults.
I remember a certain digital clock that would slowly gain time until the display looked like a stop watch running, the fault... a leaky capacitor - badly made, that faulted in the entire run of these clocks.
I was there when the first TRS80m1 came out and we didn't actually have a computer dept at the time and a single chap, Manfred ?, did all the repairs on them.
Who remembers the CoCo aka "Colour Computer" ?
That too had a cap fault that involved the entire service dept spending a week or two doing nothing but cap replacement on the entire Australian stock! I can still remember the forklift bringing pallets of the things into the back of the service dept
We had fun - the obligatory green service tag sometimes ended up with odd repair descriptions to send back to the customer.
"Found short circuit - lengthened it"
"Replaced broken spoke in megacycle"
Sometimes, the gear would almost kill us.
I had an amp come in - "doesn't work" - didn't notice the customer had replaced the 3 pin mains plug.
Did notice when I took the timber shell off and touched the metal sub-frame!!
One of the oddest repairs was a combo record player/amp/radio came in from out west with a fault report of "doesn't work"
A colleague scored this repair and gave out a great shout when he loosed the sprung screws holding the turntable down and tiny black snakes came wriggling out. There was a small nest of snakes hatching in the unit, and a mouse must have found the eggs since its fried carcase was draped across the input of the power supply.
Most mains stuff didn't have the heat shrink or shielding it does today so it was awful easy to come in contact with, something that happened way too often.
I have more stories from those days I might share at some other time
Anyway suffice to say, repairing stuff at Tandy gave me a great breadth of knowledge in electronics that's buried somewhere underneath the pile of computer knowledge I have today.
I spent a few years there until I moved on and ended up repairing Apple kit for a dealer. Moved on from that to other computer based endeavors these days.
cheers
Tim