The Journey of MaxOhr: This Light is not meant for me alone – Episode Three(The Apprentice)

Episode 3: The Apprentice

 

By the time I was eight years old, curiosity had already become a way of life.

I had dismantled radios.

Investigated televisions.

Performed unauthorized surgery on a teddy bear.

And earned enough punishments to convince most people that I should stay away from electronics forever.

Instead, I wanted to get closer.

Much closer.

Around that time, I met a man who would unknowingly become one of the earliest contributors to my journey.

He was a professional electronics technician and a friend of my elder sister.

I still remember the first time I stepped into his workshop.

The smell greeted me before anything else.

Burnt flux.

Dusty circuit boards.

Televisions leaned against one wall.

DVD players waited patiently on a workbench.

Speakers, radios, power supplies, tangled wires, and countless tiny electronic components everywhere.

To most people, it was just another roadside repair shop.

To me, it was a university.

Every faulty device represented a mystery waiting to be solved.

Every circuit board looked like a map leading somewhere I desperately wanted to go.

I saw an opportunity, and I decided to pursue it myself.

Nobody sent me.

Nobody persuaded me.

Nobody even suggested it.

I simply walked up to him one day and asked if he would teach me.

Looking back now, I realize that decision revealed something about me.

Even as a child, I was willing to chase knowledge wherever I believed it lived.

Thankfully, he welcomed me.

Little did he know that he wasn’t merely teaching a young boy how to repair electronics.

He was helping shape the foundation of a future builder.

For the first time in my life, I was no longer taking things apart and hoping to understand them.

I was learning the language behind them.

He introduced me to electronic components.

Resistors.

Capacitors.

Transistors.

Diodes.

Inductors.

Transformers.

Integrated Circuits (ICs).

The strange little objects I had spent years staring at inside radios and televisions suddenly had names.

They had purposes.

They had stories.

The mystery was slowly becoming understandable.

Most importantly, he taught me how to use a soldering iron.

At the time, it seemed like just another tool.

Today, I know better.

Years later, after countless repairs, modifications, refabrication projects, prototypes, and inventions, I still find myself applying the same soldering techniques he taught me.

Many technologies have changed.

Many tools have evolved.

But that simple skill has remained one of the most valuable gifts I received during those early years.

Looking back, I realize my mentor gave me more than technical knowledge.

He gave structure to my curiosity.

He also introduced me to another remarkable tool.

An analog multimeter.

A few years later, I taught myself how to use the digital version.

Surprisingly, I found the transition quite easy because my understanding of the analog multimeter had already laid the foundation.

Looking back, I realize that many of the lessons that shaped my journey worked the same way.

A solid foundation has a way of making future learning easier.

To many people, it is simply an instrument for taking electrical measurements.

To me, it became another key.

It taught me that problems leave clues.

That faults can be traced.

That invisible things can become visible if you know where and how to look.

He also taught me some of the basic principles of troubleshooting electronic faults.

To many people, they were just ordinary skills.

To some relatives and classmates, I was simply wasting my time.

But to me, every lesson unlocked another door.

Every explanation made the world a little less mysterious.

For the first time, I realized something profound.

Electronics was not magic.

It was knowledge.

Knowledge that could be learned.

Knowledge that could be applied.

Knowledge that could be used to solve problems.

That realization changed everything.

I immersed myself in learning.

Watching.

Observing.

Listening.

Asking questions.

Practicing.

Most of the time, I simply stood quietly, watching him work.

Sometimes, I tried things myself.

And other times, he assigned simple repairs to me.

The workshop became the place where my curiosity found direction.

It was there that curiosity stopped being a hobby and quietly became a calling.

Where fascination slowly transformed into competence.

Where a little boy stopped merely wondering how things worked and began learning how to make them work again.

That passion followed me into secondary school.

While many students spent their free time talking, playing football, or simply waiting for the next class, I often found myself surrounded by faulty scientific calculators.

Some had missing or fallen-out buttons.

Some refused to power on.

Others had display problems.

Word somehow spread around the school.

“Timi can fix scientific calculators.”

Before long, classmates and even students from other classes began bringing theirs to me.

One after another.

I repaired so many Casio scientific calculators that I became so familiar with them I could perfectly rearrange their fallen-out buttons entirely from memory.

It became second nature.

Before then, one of my classmates had already given me two amusing nicknames.

One day, I decided to combine both names into one.

“Chucklum.”

I jokingly declared it to be my scientific name.

Considering how much I loved science subjects, it somehow felt appropriate.

To my surprise, it stuck.

Soon, many classmates and even some teachers stopped calling me Timi.

To them, I had become Chucklum, the science-loving boy who was always fixing something.

Looking back now, I smile whenever I remember it.

Even now, more than a decade later, some of my old schoolmates still call me Chucklum.

Long before I understood what my future would look like, people around me were already associating me with science, electronics, and curiosity.

Whatever device landed in my hands, I examined it patiently.

The money was never the attraction.

The joy was.

There was something deeply satisfying about restoring something that had stopped working.

Something about bringing life back to what others had already given up on.

I loved watching dead things come alive again.

I loved proving that “faulty” did not always mean “finished.”

Every successful repair felt like a small victory.

Not because I had earned anything.

But because I had learned something.

Looking back now, I realize those calculators, and every other device that found its way into my hands became some of my earliest teachers.

They taught me patience.

Observation.

Discipline.

Creative thinking.

Troubleshooting.

Most importantly, they taught me that many problems become solvable when you are willing to pay attention.

That lesson has stayed with me throughout my life.

In fact, it eventually became one of my personal philosophies:

“The ability to pay more attention to details is what makes a genius.”

Yet even then…

Something inside me remained restless.

Repairing things brought me joy.

Understanding them fascinated me.

But there was another question quietly growing inside me.

A bigger question.

Not,

“How was this made?”

But,

“What can I make?”

I could not fully explain it then.

I simply knew that while repairing existing inventions excited me, creating entirely new ones fascinated me even more.

The desire had been there from the very beginning.

The little boy who dismantled his father’s radio had never been satisfied with merely understanding other people’s inventions.

Deep down, he wanted to create inventions of his own.

He just didn’t know how yet.

That understanding would take years to develop.

Years filled with learning.

Experimentation.

Failure.

Growth.

Teaching.

Writing.

Faith.

And eventually, a season where life would pull me away from building altogether.

At the time, I would have called that season a setback.

Today, I know it was preparation.

Because sometimes purpose does its deepest work when it feels as though nothing is happening at all.

And without realizing it…

Mine was about to begin.