I really liked that one about hizhonor striking the laws of physics becuase
the legislature(?) hadn't passed them.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dr. Gerald N. Johnson" <geraldj@weather.net>
To: <tentec@contesting.com>
Sent: Friday, February 19, 2010 6:46 PM
Subject: Re: [TenTec] Electric safety
> On Fri, 2010-02-19 at 01:17 -0500, DAVID HELLER wrote:
>> I guess many of us working around varied voltages have made contact
>> somewhere along the line. Just before my draft number came up I didn't
>> start the last term in school and took a job in an electronics factory.
>> By
>> virtue of a few years EE undergraduate and some radio experience I
>> started
>> as final inspector, duties being to make sure the things were working,
>> correct any mis-wiring, replace any new-defective components, make final
>> alignment and test. Only once did I get hit, and it was with about 600
>> vdc.
>> I pulled a metal tube out of a chassis not knowing that some girl on the
>> line had wired a B+ line to pin 1 (always ground in an octal receiving
>> tube). I didn't manage to get the tube out; the entire unit, about 100
>> lbs,
>> left the bench for the floor about where I had landed. No real damage to
>> the
>> radio or me, but I did take a short break. Put it back on the bench,
>> corrected the wiring, got it ready to ship and just kept going. I was
>> more
>> resilient those days than I am now.
>>
>> Separate grounding wire in metal conduit? Absolutely. NEC allows a lot
>> of
>> things that bother me, and leaves a few things out that bother me.
>>
>> I get the impression that you've had the same exerience as I - most cases
>> are settled after deposition, the negligence being so evident. The real
>> fun
>> came from the cases where some lawyer thought he could show me up on
>> cross-examination. Not once did the lawyer win. Dave, K3TX
>
> I had several never get to the deposition stage. Those were the ones
> where my report was a quarter page with a simple wiring diagram
> attached. Though one widow did grumble mightily about paying so much
> money per word of my report. It took all summer to find the permuted
> connections, some were buried 9' deep as if someone wished them to be
> hard to find.
>
> When I began as an expert witness, defense attorneys (as an independent
> I tended to be hired by the injured parties or their survivors) and
> judges respected technical experts. As time went on more "experts"
> showed up willing to testify to any cause for a price (I've told more
> than one potential client, "You don't want me in that trial because I
> think you don't have a case", "I know your product, your product is
> indeed junk.") and that has hurt the reputations of the expert
> witnesses. And in the early days the defense attorneys would be decently
> schooled in the technology by their expert so they could (temporarily)
> ask decent questions. But someone wrote a book on cross examining the
> expert witness and suggested the testimony could be destroyed by making
> the witness loose his cool so cross turned into a personal attack on the
> witness, not his technical testimony. I'm happy to no longer be subject
> to such abuse.
>
> Some of my best witnesses where the factory engineers who admitted that
> the product sample shown them was junk and should have never passed
> inspection or left the factory. That and the fact that they were not
> used to the courtroom and testified to their attorney, not to the jury.
> There is an art to good testimony to the jury. The amateur witness
> doesn't know that. Many an attorney beat on me to get me trained to
> testify to the jurors.
>
> 73, Jerry, K0CQ
>
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