...you're on Det in Australia (Darwin) for Ex Pitch Black. Your C stores, LRU's and everything else needed to service eight tornados are on a boat somewhere between "Singapore and Sydney". The first wave has just returned and you've got SMS snags. At that point your ex-bay lecky JNCO traces the problem to a circuit board in the Pylon Decoder Unit. As the spares are still afloat somewhere, he calmly unscrews the PDU, fabricates a board puller from a wire coathangar (and the ubiquitous Leatherman), nips out to Radio Shack buys a soldering iron and some solder, resolders the errant diode, resistor or whatever it was, reassembles the PDU, puts it back in the pylon, carries out a WPU BITE and signs the aircraft up in time for the night wave! You just can't teach that kind of ingenuity.
You're on Red Flag at the end of the runway and the same JNCO decides to use a chock to fix an SMS snag! Takes the chock and smartly raps the pylon quite hard to reseat the board in the PDU. WPU BITE carried out fault clears and jet launches. Fellow end of runway crews from the USN and USAF looking-on amazed finally come over to ask if he really just hit the aircraft with a chock. Calm reply is paraphrased from another great engineer tale - I charge a hundred bucks for that fix, one dollar for hitting the pylon, ninety-nine dollars for knowing where to hit it!
