Gold Star
Last week I was called to resolve a home theater issue for a retired couple in Haw Creek. The husband had been in engineering so knew a thing or two about my line of work, and had explained when he called that there was a flaw in the speaker system that had knocked out their previous receiver, and caused their new receiver to randomly go into “protect”.
I redid all of the connections on the receiver and replaced some inadequate speaker wire going to the terminals on the wall. I measured a short on one pair of terminals, and for some reason it seemed the terminal board was not well secured. The husband explained that he had had the cabinet remodeled recently and the workers had broken one of the two mounting tabs on the board. He said he had not been able to find a replacement. I told him I was sure I had one with me and would replace it, since I would have to take it off anyway to find the reason for the shorted speaker pair.
Once I had it off the wall, I could see what had happened. The workers had attempted to compensate for the broken tab by gluing a small piece of flat metal in its place. Well, not surprisingly the glue did not hold and the little piece of metal had slipped out of its position and was resting against the speaker terminals.
I did have a replacement, and once I had taken care of that and secured the new board to the wall, put everything back together and it worked just fine. I set all the levels and showed him how to work the new receiver. What an able student! When it was time to settle up, as I was writing the bill I jokingly said I deserved a gold star for finding and eliminating the problem.
As he was writing the check, the wife left the room and returned just a few moments later with a small plastic case full of gold stars. She gave me a half dozen. Little did I know, she was a retired schoolteacher. We laughed and chatted for a few more minutes before I went on my way. I hadn’t gotten that many gold stars even when I was in grammar school!
