phil.p":3pbjvvis said:
Eric The Viking":3pbjvvis said:
Handy word all the same, especially so when threatening badly behaved computer equipment.
"percussive maintenance" is useful, as well.
I had a weird deja vu moment a few years back: in the early 2010s I was asked into the BBC in Bristol to do a "down-the-line" interview for a London programme.
Technically, this is often achieved by use of a cupboard known as the "unattended studio". The idea dates back to WW2 I think - studios and staff being too expensive and travel being awkward. These places were set up all round the country (similar cupboards were found all over the UK in town halls (remember them), office blocks, and other BBC sites), so they could quickly get people on air should they need to, without getting them to a main studio centre, and avoiding expensive studio bookings (and staff). The Bristol "unattended" is (was) just behind the BBC's main reception area, to where it was moved a few decades ago from an older part of the site.
The equipment was semi-automatic (later versions had some elements of remote control), owned by radio News and Current Affairs (NCA), and London News had priority and managed the bookings. My department in Bristol occasionally baby-sat contributors, if they were especially technophobic and if we had staff available. The latter could be anybody of any grade, senior staff or sprogs, and it might be quite fun, as you never knew who you might be assisting.
When the studio was moved, one of the items transferred was the engineering fault-report (EFR) book. Every studio had one: auto-carbon, top copy to maintenance, second copy staying in the book. Maintenance had their own box on the form, where they could write any repair action taken.
I had time to kill, so I took it down off the shelf and had a quick read.
OK I am a sad bu**er, but wow! I don't think the book had been used for about 15 years, but I found EFRs written by me and colleagues from the 1980s. A real trip down Memory Lane...
... The one thing that would have made it truly wonderful was "fault rectified by percussion maintenance". Yes, we hit stuff and it really did get written into the book occasionally. For example, in the days of big reel-to-reel tape machines, there was a certain model where the brakes regularly jammed - that was a safe bet (I vaguely remember a block of wood for the purpose). When that model used to come up on eBay, you could often see the dent and scraped paint in the pictures (there was an exact spot...). But in that era many technical things BBC-ish just needed a well-aimed thump.
Happy days.
E.
