Soldering Iron lesson I learned the hard way If the tip falls out of the iron and lands on the carpet - DO NOT kick it around like you intuitively think to do. It’s best to leave it where it is while looking for the pliers to pick it up
If you kick it around, you end up with lots of burn holes in the carpet!
That’s not a fail, it’s simply showing how an Electrical Engineer uses a soldering iron when the Electrical Engineering Technology grad isn’t around!
Back when I was in school, the EE students were quite sure they were smarter than us lowly Electrical Engineering Technology students. We, on the other hand, were equally certain that while EE’s might very well be able to do Fourier transforms in thier heads, thier practical skills were useless.
That is probably a problem with many educations: People starting on the education do not really know much about it.
When I started on a EE, there where very few in the class that had used a solder iron. I remember one fun episode: Go to the lab and build this 10kHz oscillator with this 741 (I was told to shut up, before I even said anything).
For people not knowing about old electronic stuff: 741 was a slow OpAmp, even if theoretical OpAmp calculation showed that a circuit would oscillate at 10kHz the 741 was way to slow to do that, if you had used these parts you would know that, but people only reading theory did not know it.
In the group mentioned they made a game of finding all of the things wrong with the photo like the way the soldering iron is held, no grounding strap, no vac for fumes, unprotected cpu slot, etc.