It was a dark and murky day in January of 1967 and the weather was on the far side of yech when a DC 8 hit the wild blue out of Copenhagen bound for New York.

In the seat next to me was my wife of four days standing. I was not to know at that time but when that DC 8 left the Danish winter weather behind, it also started me on a career which eventually led me to become a technical writer although, at that time I, like so many other engineers did not give it a second thought where technical documentation really came from. Maybe a stork with a talent for writing made it on the long haul from Egypt with loads of babies or whatever, I for one did not really care. I only knew; that a true blue blooded engineer in the noble arts of electronics would rather break an arm than don a pencil and jot down experience acquired, for the benefit of posterity.

Eighteen months of intensive training in the Danish Air Force had taught me everything there was to know about electronics or so I thought at that time.

Later I learned the hard way that this long training plus additional training in the US army was just the beginning stages of learning.

The tough part was in waiting for me when I alone had to get a defective radar back in business in subzero temperatures, while impatient officers, unfeeling and with half empty coffee mugs in their hands, screamed for action from their well heated offices while I, the poor devil, was up front with a soldering iron in my pocket, to keep it warm, the soldering iron not the pocket, or swinging up side down like another monkey in a huge antenna trying to measure if the darned thing had warped so that the Ruskies or whoever, really would come from wherever they were supposed to come from.

It was all very exciting but everything gets a little old after a while and I remember the night, when I was on duty and an especially dumb guy called, in the middle of the night, to ask for help as the antenna did not want to turn the way he wanted it to. That was call number three that night and the time was just as many hours past midnight. I did not know it at that time, but there and then, with my sleepy mind, I used the American acronym RYMF and roared: - Read chapter 21 §1 through 10, and leave me alone, where upon I slammed down the receiver and went back to sleep again not to be disturbed before morning.

This chapter of the manual sported the heading: "How to destruct the equipment by gunfire to prevent enemy use". Obviously my military career did not have the attraction it used to, not any more. I left after a while and left others to defend the country, and judging from what I hear, it leaves something to be desired, so maybe it was not all that bad after all.
Even at that time, in the military, I had done a little technical writing just to find out that an old conservative establishment like the air force was not easily to be shaken by bright young spirits who tried to help.
I started out as a "gung ho" service engineer doing the third planet on odd repair jobs, and it was here that I finally got the knack of writing technical material as far too much good information was lost for the service department because actual experience with the equipment was not documented or properly recorded.

Some genius somewhere found out, that if I could write things like that, maybe I could also read it aloud to somebody else, and so it came to be, that I reluctantly accepted doing technical seminars using my own books. After all it entitled things like drinking beer around the barbecue in Australia in the month of January while people were freezing blue in my home town in Denmark or sitting in a bar in Singapore, after hours of course, entertaining customers.

I am fully aware of the saying: If you are too stupid to repair things, then you can write about them or even worse teach others to do it, or as a radio engineer so nicely put it, when he heard that I was a technical writer: - You sure must have been hard put to give up a well paid jobs as a service engineer.

I agreed and promptly forgot to tell him the other bad sides of the job like having to while away a week-end in Hawaii on route home from a teaching job in New Zealand. Or other similar terrible things like doing the Macchu Picchu in the Andes, watching Taj Mahal in India or the Grand Canyon in the US or bathing in the hot springs in New Zealand or snorkelling over the Great Barrier Reef off the Australian Coast all because I had time to kill on week-ends abroad. Yeah I surely had been hard put.
From time to time, when that got boring I had to hit the keyboard to make more technical documentation, but then again, you cannot have everything, and as the saying goes: It beats work by a fair mile.

But in the end, I like so many others, ended up in a sales department hawking machinery all over the globe. But when somebody from the service dept. says, like so many from service departments have said before, about a salesman: - He just would not be able to recognize a service manual or for that matter a printed circuit board if you hit him over the head with it, then I bow my head humbly and reply:
- Try me. Some have, they are not likeable to forget it again because I remember my roots, and I have had a ball since that January day in 1967.