In all honesty, I don't think Techs today are what we would consider a tech should be. We live in a world where people make sandwiches and are labelled " sandwich artists".
.....and they can't even get that right - - - they are making ROLLS not sandwiches!!!
For my entire working life I have been annoyed by every man and his dog calling themselves a "technician".
Now we have "Nail technician, Tyre fitting technician" etc WTF!!!
I was very often called an "electrician" (apologies to the electricians out there) and I would get quite cross and correct the speaker by saying "electricians twist wires together and technicians diagnose and repair electronics".
This was back in the day when you were actually trained how to design and diagnose circuits down to component level. That just doesn't happen any more.
Anyway, back to techs repairing pinball machines.
I was apprentice trained as a Technician and worked in electronics (NOT electrics) and when the first Bally SS machine arrived in Brisbane (Playboy) at Musictime the "techs", who were mostly ex PMG "wire jerkers", were scratching their heads and had NO IDEA what they were looking at when they opened the backbox. One of these techs knew of me (his daughter was going out with my brother) and he asked if I would like to look at this new machine over a Friday "after work beer."
Free beer AND pinball - what's NOT to like, hahaha (actually I knew very little about pinball at that time).
I started work there the following Monday....
Baisically my job ended up being to repair the boards as they were exchanged and brought back to the workshop. Well, what a mess that was, the techs had no idea what to do as far as repairing these new monsters went.
Forget about any maintenance such as lamps, rubbers - they couldn't keep the machines running!!!
In the end I had to lay down the law as my repaired boards were coming back - blown up again - at a furious rate and, naturally, it was all my fault because I "hadn't repaired the board properly".
I held a few "repair workshops" over the next couple of months and basically taught the techs NOT to just plug in the repaired board and expect all would be good. Etc Etc
After a while the dust settled and I had them organised a lot better. We were then able to attend to more mundane repairs but usually these were very much "if it ain't broke - don't fix it".
If a flipper stopped working then that required immediate attention - when the tech called he repaired the flipper with whatever parts were in his toolbox or with parts robbed from other assemblies in the machine. A quick wipe over the PF and replace any OBVIOUS dodgy rubbers and maybe a few lamps if things looked a bit dark but that was it - nothing else.
To their credit, at Musictime we rarely moved pinballs from one location directly to another - they usually came back to the workshop first and we had two techs dedicated to shopping them out before they were then re-sited. As far as field repairs go though, they were patch it up ONLY.
I did my fair share of field service work as well including on many EMs in mostly remote pub locations as we were always short on techs and especially short on ones who actually knew what they were doing. (please don't think I am being big headed here - it is a simple fact that there were practically no formally trained "techs" repairing pinballs back in the day).
Gavin is right with his observation, anyone can call themselves a technician these days and many seem to think they are because they saw a multimeter once and they know how to plug in a replacement board.....
As it happens I am writing a book but that will be a way off......here is a mockup of the cover (and yes, I am well aware that RCT is 2002 - this is a MOCKUP cover).
