Friday Funny – I can see technicians from my house

Malcolm Miller says:
August 12, 2011 at 3:40 pm
As a one-time senior technician at an observatory, I found that technicians had to be able to do everything, including operate all the equipment as well as maintain it, while academic staff had only one thing to do, and weren’t always good at that. The smartest academics had started off as technical people and then gone on to a PhD.

There is some truth to this, academics are wonderfully inept, but what I have found is that the smartest folks are those with an education, and who have to apply it to make things work. I can tell you stories about technicians who had a particular way of doing things, which was sometimes counter-productive and sometimes just plainly wrong.