[Aerodyne]

Millions of 'em, but I liked the scribbled message from the receptionist 'Pic gone'.
It had gone all right. Along with the tube. An all-night party had ended up with the TV being knocked onto a tiled floor, face down. All that was left in the 1400 cabinet was a mass of fine glass powder and a shattered PCB.
Colour TV? Accused of having left the test card in the back. It's a regular, that one, but absolutely true in the days when test card transmissions ran during daytime hours.
Also colour: picture poor colour complaint usually fixed by turning one of the guns down asking for opinions as it was brought back up to exactly the same spot. It was always better, according to the customer (a migraine suffer, like me)
This isn't funny, but I went quite regularly to the home of a chap who was suffering from multiple sclerosis. The TV was usually OK and I think he liked the company. He was in a bed in the living room and each visit he'd worsened until eventually he could not lift his head, so he had a mirror to watch the TV through. He grumbled that captions were 'back to front' so I fixed it by crossing the horizontal scan coil connections. A few weeks later he passed away and the set was repo'ed and immediately sent out again. I didn't get the chance to put the coils back, so someone must have accepted the mirror-image pictures!
Somebody should make a film about life as a TV engineer in the sixties. I'd pay to see it...
-Tony