I have a tenuous connection to the Wahine disaster even though I hadn't arrived in NZ yet when it happened.
As fate would have it, Angus Tait of Tait Electronics was traveling on the Wahine with a specialized piece of equipment about the size of a medium sized suitcase called The Ferret. When he realized the ship was in trouble the only thing he rescued besides The Ferret was himself but in that process, as was found out later, The Ferret was damaged and would no longer work properly. It was an awkward thing and quite heavy and unwieldly with it, he carried it wading amongst the rocks through the sea water to get to shore safely.
As senior factory technician it was my job to get it working again, a number of engineers from the Laboratory had tried and failed and as I had found before engineers are often not good in approaching a piece of faulty equipment that is new to them but has been working and fix it. However that was not me as I had spent most of my younger life fixing things I knew little about and fixing them from basic principles as I grew up in Africa and there were shortages of everything there.
As you may guess I did fix it very quickly, about half an hours work and was surprised how easy the job was and that they hadn't managed it themselves, namely cracked circuit boards. We had full repair documentation but I just used my eyes and fixed it. This feat gave me a favorable reputation with Angus and led on the greater things called The Tecumat (Tait Electronic Canterbury University Multiple Node Tester) a collaboration with Canterbury University to build our own in house automatic testing equipment.
Since the word is being used freely on this site, as a humorous aside, the staff using the machine used to call it Computerised Universal Node Tester, I'll leave you to work out the acronym lol.
By the way I am Central African not South African I come from Northern Rhodesia, later called Zambia and we are a distinct group from Southern Rhodesians (Zimbabweans) and South Africans, at least to ourselves. We all don't like the others but tolerate them for various reasons although time really has moved on now for us all, we are few and far between.
As fate would have it, Angus Tait of Tait Electronics was traveling on the Wahine with a specialized piece of equipment about the size of a medium sized suitcase called The Ferret. When he realized the ship was in trouble the only thing he rescued besides The Ferret was himself but in that process, as was found out later, The Ferret was damaged and would no longer work properly. It was an awkward thing and quite heavy and unwieldly with it, he carried it wading amongst the rocks through the sea water to get to shore safely.
As senior factory technician it was my job to get it working again, a number of engineers from the Laboratory had tried and failed and as I had found before engineers are often not good in approaching a piece of faulty equipment that is new to them but has been working and fix it. However that was not me as I had spent most of my younger life fixing things I knew little about and fixing them from basic principles as I grew up in Africa and there were shortages of everything there.
As you may guess I did fix it very quickly, about half an hours work and was surprised how easy the job was and that they hadn't managed it themselves, namely cracked circuit boards. We had full repair documentation but I just used my eyes and fixed it. This feat gave me a favorable reputation with Angus and led on the greater things called The Tecumat (Tait Electronic Canterbury University Multiple Node Tester) a collaboration with Canterbury University to build our own in house automatic testing equipment.
Since the word is being used freely on this site, as a humorous aside, the staff using the machine used to call it Computerised Universal Node Tester, I'll leave you to work out the acronym lol.
By the way I am Central African not South African I come from Northern Rhodesia, later called Zambia and we are a distinct group from Southern Rhodesians (Zimbabweans) and South Africans, at least to ourselves. We all don't like the others but tolerate them for various reasons although time really has moved on now for us all, we are few and far between.
It's not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable. The hundred-times-refuted theory of "free will" owes its persistence to this charm alone; some one is always appearing who feels himself strong enough to refute it - Friedrich Nietzsche