Another one from the Holiday Camp electronics store
because the electronics store wasn't like 'Dixons' or 'Comet' but one that indeed sold electronics of the discrete variety (I'm pretty sure we sold over 300 different types of transistors alone, never mind capacitors, ICs, soldering kit, PCB board etc) as well as other electronic gubbins, we tended to attract a specific slice of the population. Ham radio enthusiasts were rarely a couple of hours apart, model railway fans and electronics hobbyists made up the bulk of the remainder, as well as some pretty serious engineery types who couldn't wait for the mail order to show up the next day and needed stuff on the spot.

Now, hobbyists are an amiable lot, generally quiet, unassuming, polite and intelligent, as were the model train enthusiasts. Engineers were professionally courteous and knowledgeable. You've guessed that there wasn't a whole lot of female content in the aforementioned consumer brackets, so when a lady of any half-attractive variety appeared at the counter there was usually an imperceptible struggle among the counter staff to get through your current customer and be next to talk with a real live lady. I think on average we got about two a week on a Saturday, and none at all weekdays.

But I digress. The company started off in the field of DIY build-yourself-an-electronic-organ from a kit, a venture started out in the owners' back bedroom but by 1994 had swollen to 30 shops nationwide as they diversified into electronic components and kits and then took on other stock lines in a related vein. Pretty soon, kits to make amplifiers were accompanied by the speakers to ply the sound from, the cabinets, crossovers, grilles and so forth. Then came microphones, mixing desks and disco lighting. Then car amplifiers, subwoofers and speakers for them too. This led to an altogether different brand of clientele. The professional shoplifter and burglar.

One day a shoplifter wanted to get access to the secure storage cabinets (that used to be glass-doored fridge units but were converted to 'display cabinets' and padlocked shut). To protect the cabinets, a loud siren would sound if any of the doors were opened without the security system being keyed off. Magnetic proximity sensors would know if the padlocks had been defeated and the doors opened, so we felt pretty safe in leaving them unsupervised during the day.

That doesn't stop the shoplifter. He went to the tool section and nicked a pair of side-cutters, pliers and a screwdriver. Then drifting back to the key lock he levered the keyswitch cover back with the screwdriver, snipped the wire to the siren with the sidecutters and uses the pliers to wrench the padlock hasp around until it breaks. Alarm is disarmed, doors are opened and £100's worth of items go missing. However we hear that another branch of the same company lost 3 18 inch woofers (speakers) from the shop floor in one day, despite being tagged with high-tensile steel tags and the proximity alarm by the door which somehow didn't go off.....

However this was an invisible crime, and to most people's mind, a victimless one. What happened another time was a full-scale break in through the roof. Boxes kicked over, flo-pack everywhere, lots and lots of car amps and speakers nicked. The bell box was stiffed with expanding foam so it was virtually silent, the phone wires cut so the dialler device couldn't leave an automated message with the cops.

The tidy up was lengthy, the cataloging of missing stock tedious and repairing the security a pain, because (oh, we sold security systems as well :-/ ) the previous installer was an ex-member of staff with an eidetic memory- he cross wired all of the sensors with different colour schemes to foil a sharp-witted tom-cruise-o-like but never wrote down what was stored in his head. So I was tasked with reinstalling the security system with improvements.

The bell box was to be located off the front of the shop at roof level, an alarm strobe in plain view above the door and all the sensors rewired. Now, being perched atop the folding ladder to drill into the metal-framed doorway for affixing the strobe light, the ladder, er, folded. I came down about 6 feet onto the concrete flagstones and (I found out later) fractured the scaphoid bone in my right hand. But the shop was still defenceless against further crime so I finished wiring up the rest of the system and even had to hang over the edge of the roof to drill and screw in the alarm bellbox somewhere incaccessible- with a broken hand and feeling sick and dizzy.

I never saw the 'customers' who broke into the shop but I ended up with a broken hand because of it. Bastards.
( Rotating Wobbly Hat That's not a banana. THIS is a banana., Mon 8 Sep 2008, 18:58, 3 replies)

Maplins eh?
How many of the components in the catalogue do they actually have in stock? Last time I bought components from them they didn't have standard 74-series logic chips.
( idonthaveafunnynickname Drink-Aware? Sure. I'm aware I want another drink., Mon 8 Sep 2008, 20:45, closed)

Aha, a consumer eh?
TTL? LS or HC?
4000 series CMOS if you have antistatic protection, best if you don't want to fork out for 7805 regulators.

I still got it.

Left there 12 years ago :-)
( Rotating Wobbly Hat That's not a banana. THIS is a banana., Mon 8 Sep 2008, 23:59, closed)

@idonthaveafunnynickname
The Maplin near me (sidenote: Anyone else think "discrete components" sounds a bit dodgy? My ex-boss did...) normally has a decent stock of things, though it's normally 1 less than what I'm asking for.

It's a shame Maplin got rid of its ludicrously thick catalogues a few years ago. I used to love thumbing through those. Sad, I know!
( uberdeity Wondered why Owen Lars knew of the term "hell" on, Tue 9 Sep 2008, 11:24, closed)