So one of our phone jacks stopped working recently, and I messed with it for a while looking for the problem. Once I had narrowed it down to the box where it stopped working, and tried the old engineer's trick of taking it apart and putting it back together (to no avail), I was resigned to re-running the line to it. But since that would have been a big pain, I wanted to make sure it was really the wire, since it still looked fine.
And so, drawing on the resources and skills gained from a childhood of tinkering with simple circuits, I built a simple circuit tester from a battery and an LED scavenged from a dead cordless phone that I didn't have any use for but couldn't quite bring myself to get rid of (because you never know when you'll need some parts).
So I was quickly able to ascertain that the line from the last working box did work, and instead focus on the box itself (which I had mistakenly believed was not the problem once I'd unscrewed all the connectors and reattached them). A few minutes later, using only my pocket knife, I had repaired it, and all was well again. All that without ever taking circuits!
Maybe I should talk to the university about getting an honorary EE degree at the next commencement ;)
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