A Day at Club Wheat

Club WheatWheatstone Director of Sales Jay Tyler is notorious for his Club Wheat tours. Anyone who has been on one of his tours of our factory in New Bern can see that he’s really into it. We try to keep him in the front office so he can get his work done now that he’s racking up the frequent flier miles traveling the globe for Wheatstone.


But, sure enough, while unpacking from one trip and packing up for another recently, he slipped under our radar and was found once again in the back with his tour hat on. By the time we caught up with him, he had popped the lid off a WheatNet-IP BLADE and was peering into it along with the day’s visitor, Thomas Alexander of Curtis Media. Thomas, a part time employee and one of the younger members on the Curtis Media engineering team, had made the trip from Raleigh to New Bern earlier to see about repairing his BLADE that had taken a lightning hit and wouldn’t power on. “I told Thomas to use his best social-engineering skills and see if he could score a tour,” commented Allen Sherrill, the Director of Engineering for Curtis Media. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that he encountered Jay and got the full treatment.”

After a full tour of Club Wheat, and somewhere between the surface mounting, metal work, powder coating and screening, young Thomas and Jay had decided to roll up their sleeves to take a crack at repairing a BLADE should lightning strike Curtis Media’s stations again.

After identifying and replacing the ICs likely to be damaged by lightning, Jay showed Thomas the architecture of the BLADE and how they are field repairable before finally sending him on his way with instructions and a few spare ICs in his pocket.

Jay managed to catch his flight and a few after that, and our guess is that the next time we see Thomas at the factory, it’ll be for the tour and not to swap out a unit.

 

 

 

 

 

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