Soldering: if it smells like chicken, you’re holding it wrong!

This T-shirt sums up soldering basics quite well. Funny too. But I hear you say, surely you don’t need to really explain that?
I’d agree, and in our experience with soldering with primary school students in classrooms, we’ve never had any such fuss.

However, in stock photography, we find the following “examples”…

This stock photo model (they appear in many other photos) is holding a hot air gun of a soldering rework station, by the metal part! If the station were turned on, there’d be third degree burns and a distinct nasty smell…

The open hard disk assembly near the front is also quite shiny…..

As if one isn’t enough, here’s another stock photo sample, again held by the metal part:
On a practical level, it’s very unlikely you’d be dealing with a modern computer  main board using a regular soldering iron, on the component side.

But what actually annoyed me most about this photo is something else: the original title goes something like “beautiful woman … soldering …”. Relevance? The other photo doesn’t say “hot spunk soldering”, and although that would be just as irrelevant, fact is that with articles and photos of professional women, their appearance is more often than not made a key part of their description. Which is just sexist garbage, bad journalism and bad copy-writing.

Which brings us to this final soldering stock photo sample. Just What The?

Female body selling soldering iron? Come on now. “Bad taste” doesn’t even remotely sum up the wrongness of it all.

Note: the low-res stock photo samples in this article are shown in a satirical fair-use context.