The "Spark" Behind our EE's interest in their field
You may wonder what ignited the geek so to speak or, put another equally corny way, what event livened the wire in the brains of our electrical design team.
In the case of the youngest member of our team, Robert, who has worked for SAI since his high school days as an intern returning upon graduation from college, the seed was planted even earlier in his education--first grade to be exact when he landed in trouble for putting a staple in an outlet in order to see what would happen. Let's just say sparks flew literally and figuratively.
For Badri, who hails from Nepal though he became a U.S. citizen several years ago, it was the "shock" he received when using the primitive heaters of his childhood to boil water that drew him to learn more about electricity. He originally came to the States to study electrical engineering with plans to return to Nepal to work on the hydroelectric plants being built throughout Nepal and India by Enron in the 1990's. Well, we all know what happened to Enron and with it Badri's plans. But their loss is our gain as Badri has been in the field for over a decade.
The dinosaur of our electrical team, Maury, appropriately enough, first put his interest into practice at Christmas time when he decided to use a discarded plug his grandfather gave him to juice up his train set. He stripped the insulation from the wires and bypassed the train transformer to connect directly to the track. The result: the trains flew off the track, house lights blew and thumbnails were blackened. Fortunately for his family, their home at the time had fuses instead of circuit breakers or it might have burned down. Needless to say, he not only learned about the power of electricity that day but some powerful new curse words as his mother called her dad to question the wisdom of giving a youngster of seven such a "toy". Little did she know then that those words would serve him well as an adult when he takes covers off panelboards.
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