"The homeless bring numbers," said Alex Smith Jr., 50, a former repairman who lives at the shelter and joined the protests.
While that might seem a humble and humane response from a cable company, in fairness it is worth noting that the former repairman, who is not identified by name in the video, fell asleep as he tried to get through to the cable company's repair office on the telephone.
In 1949, a former radio repairman named Leo Fender took a slab of ash, bolted on a neck, and screwed in some magnetic pickups to amplify the sound.
We pulled up to the residence of a former refrigerator repairman named John Guman, who does not drink wine or any other kind of alcohol.
The best known might be Howard Finster, a former TV repairman and Baptist minister compelled to paint "sacred art" after seeing a vision while fixing a bicycle.
Robert DeSouza, 60, a disabled former appliance repairman in Sacramento, still calls himself a Democrat but says he has voted Republican since Richard M. Nixon's election in 1968.
Branko, a former television repairman who now ekes out a living by farming, leaves the house accompanied by two other men.
Semifinalists this year in "America's Got Talent," ArcAttack! employs giant Tesla coils that have been "modified to play music through their lightning," said Joe DiPrima, 30, a former television repairman and the group's chief engineer.
Indeed, the suit's head engineer, Leonard Sheperd, was a former television repairman from Queens who was recruited to Playtex after he artfully fixed the television set of the company's founder, Abram Spanel.
In 1996, I came upon an enthralling subject: a Depression-era racehorse named Seabiscuit, trained by a mustang breaker who rarely spoke, owned by a former bicycle repairman, and ridden by a half-blind failed prizefighter.
Today, almost a year and a half after the Feb. 11, 2000, incident, a jury of eight women and four men took 40 minutes to convict Mr. Burnett, a former telephone repairman in San Jose, of one felony count of animal cruelty.
