Ohm's Law
My third shortest Job.
A few years ago I wrote about two times when I was fired from a job. There was another job I didn’t last long at, but the exit was mutual.
Egbert Nathaniel Dawkins III (Aloe Blacc) was once a corporate business consultant at EY and got laid off, which was apparently the seed of insecurity that grew into this hit song. I can relate to that, having been made redundant from a number of great jobs, where I was doing well; and usually after having turned down other great job offers.
The hook and melody is said to have come while he was stuck in Los Angeles traffic in 2005.
They say that he had been living in Monmouth Temple, a communal house in L.A. One of his housemates had a collection of Smithsonian field recordings including call and response songs, which were common on chain gangs, and he wanted to capture something of that.
As a kid, I remember going to a presentation and concert by Mike Seagar, sponsored by the Smithsonian Institute, at the Bunker in Devonport. The Bunker was the home of the Devonport Folk Club, where I had the pleasure of performing myself, several years later.
I still remember the event well. There were lots of old grainy movie clips and reel to real tracks, with field music and hollers, which I loved. One film clip that always resonated for me, was a man playing a wire fence, like a single-string slide guitar. He slid a bottle along the fence to change the notes, and hit the fence with a stick, to play them, accompanying the singing and maintaining the rhythm.
I haven’t experienced much driving in Los Angeles, certainly not on the roads. The longest trip there, was probably when I got on the wrong bus at LAX Airport and ended up in a long term carpark, a long way from where I was supposed to heading, which was the Tom Bradley International Terminal, where Air New Zealand flights arrive and depart. When I discovered where I was going, it was too late, and the bus couldn’t even take me back because it was going on another route. One of many not so pleasant experiences at that airport, usually caused by delayed flights and having to quickly get from one terminal to another complete with my luggage.
I can’t remember exactly when it was, but I know I was living in Ponsonby, because I got a job on the exotic K Rd, and I was able to walk to work, going past the strip clubs, working girls, drunks, homeless people, bars, cafes and interesting shops, and across the overbridge, to a small office on the first floor, above a hearing aid shop.
The job was repairing hearing aids. Yep, for a short while, I was a hearing aid technician. This mostly involved fixing and resetting hearing aids that had gone on the fritz. You might recall, I had a fantastic telecommunications education for several years, which taught me how to read circuit diagrams, understand most things electrical, except for the one question, which I asked many times, driving the lecturers nuts, “Why do transistors work?”
Anyway, I saw the job advertised and thought to myself, “How hard would this be?” I turned up for the interview, introduced myself, and explained my qualifications in telecommunications. I justified my capability on the basis that a hearing aid (especially back in the late 70’s) was basically a microphone, an amplifier and a speaker, all components being very small, but still soldered in place, like larger devices. Not all miniaturised like they are today. They actually had real transistors in them!
The owner of the business only really had one question for me, that he was fixated on, which resulted from frustration, because nobody he had interviewed before I climbed up the stairs could answer it. The question was, “What is Ohm’s Law?”
“Easy”, I said, “E equals I times R”
“OK”, he said, handing me a faulty hearing aid. “Sit at this desk, you have everything you need in front of you. See if you can fix it".
It had probably been dropped or something. When I opened it up and messed around with a tiny screwdriver, I found a dry joint, and applied a little fresh solder where a component wasn’t making a good connection. Hey presto it was working. But the volume pot was scratchy, so I gave it a tiny spray of CRC and put it back together, good as new.
That was all it took for him to hire me, “for a trial period”. So I joined him and the other hearing aid tech in the workshop, and set to work. They showed me how to mount hearing aids onto glasses for people who needed an aid for their vision as well as their hearing. I wasn’t super handy, and this is where I started showing myself up.
Long story short, I could do most jobs that came in, but it took me 2-3 times as long as the owner and the other tech, and this was something I was consistent in. I guess I got lucky with the interview task.
After about 3 weeks, the owner said to me, “You’re not really a hearing aid technician are you?” I agreed that I wasn’t, and more or less by mutual agreement, we decided that this was not going to be a career for me. It was a fun experience and I enjoyed the walk to and from work, as well as the walks around the shops, especially the record stores. It was my shortest career, that’s for sure.