Work entertainment

[Jherrith]

 

[Jherrith]

Time for some epic and I do mean "EPIC" cabling fails

Kick back and enjoy.

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[Chiron]

:yeow:

A perverse Fate leaves me with sparse measly scraps of time for the Attic and other enjoyable activities until I'm done with a couple of impossible things, but letting them go uncommented would leave me with a bad conscience :smile:

1 - I didn't know that Robin Hood and Murphy have been working together...

2 - It may shed some light on the cabling technique that in Italian "CIRCA" (on the distribution box) means "approximately".
     Good thing thing though that the wiring is thoroughly documented on the vertical wooden post on the left.
 
3 - It must have taken quite a bit of ingenuity to plug the other end into a 230 VAC outlet. Hats off!

4 - Were I a pregnant rat, how could I resist the compulsion to nest in there?

5 - Does it ever snow in the jungle?

[thelufias]

LOL.....Hard to believe folks got away with those wiring jobs......and I'm wondering what they were hunting for with their bow and arrow....

Reminds me of the time IC was shorthanded at the plant and moved a guy from shipping into the wiring department....

Took them months to trace all the panels he made errors on..... 

Thankfully none of the burners were shipped out since they were stock units for our NY account who brought burners by the Truckload. 

But it took a lot of rework so that was a very costly error and a lesson learned.... 

Pay the overtime...have those who are trained to wire....do the wiring.   

(Yes, the whole thing stemmed from the decision of the Wiring Dept foreman not wanting his department to get overtime) 

PS.....Needless to say...the foreman lost his position of foreman...and was put back to line wiring....he was lucky...most wanted him FIRED....

[Jherrith]

Well, it was a day for the books is all I can say it started off so innocently ... we were going to move only the 800MHz at the university.

First thing there was an event (job fair) at the Arena that our point of contact was unaware of ... seriously just what we wanted to deal with while working on the radio system. But since we were only working on the Public Safety side and not the staff .. should have been no big deal ...

Went to the tower and disconnected the BDA out and went back to the arena and was greeted by the staff saying their radios no longer worked.

  we only are working on the 800 not the 400 system so

Anyway got a bandage on the 400 MHz side (switched them to a talk around channel) while we carried on with the 800 MHz install.

After a couple of false starts and oops need to make another trip down to my truck for parts we were ready to let the smoke out of the BDA and see what it would do when on line. Oh BTW I walked over 5 1/4 miles today.

 

Worked like a champ still hotter then the hinges of Phelgethos, meaning we will still have to come back and tone it down a bit but will give it a day or three to run before we go back to mess with it. We will also get the rest of the old gear removed at the same time.

First up, let us give a kudos to the guys that were out with me, there working on the cut over, they did an exemplary job and got part one up in record time.

Now for the fly in the ointment. Since the 400 wasn't working anyway the point of contact pulled the trigger and said let us move that now. So got started and shortly thereafter we had it up and running.

Now here is where it gets the 400 was still not working, in fact the radio would go "bonk" and not connect at all. So a big hell

More digging on our parts and at one point the other radio tech said this is looking more like a site failure, not a install problem. Couple of other tests and that was the only solution left. So while the other two were removing the old remotes and some of the antennas from the arena side we took a ride back to the tower and started poking about over there trying to find the problem.

  Finally found it, of all things there was a power strip lying on the floor that the receive multicoupler was plugged into ... and yes .. it was switched off.

No wonder the portables would not receive

How did it get turned off well, it was next to the BDA that we moved and the switch on the power strip was flimsy at best, so if it got bumped by the excess cable that was pulled out it could have been turned off.

Seriously.

Well, turned it back on and lo and behold the portable can hit the system. Even pulled the antenna off the portable and still got into the system.

That cinched it, so back to the Arena and just using the portables the point of contact walked all the areas that previously had no signal while me and the tech started picking up our stuff. He checked in about a dozen times and it was nothing pure success.

So at last the job was complete and we had complete coverage on both bands 400 & 800 MHz and a vast improvement over the starting point.

Was quite dicey there for a while but the other guys plus the tech pulled it off.

And considering that we were only scheduled to move the one and not both, but the team did manage to once again pull a rabbit out of that extra-dimensional space.

[Jherrith]

Now for the annoying part, remember ye ole work phone with the bogus battery, well got the phone call saying the battery had come in and you can swing by any time to get the job done.

Went there after we were done at the university, as it was well within the working hours.

Got there and was told it would be an hour and a half so I said I was going to wait outside in my truck and have lunch.

Okay fine

What happens when I go back in .... uh sorry we could not replace the battery because you can only get to it from the front screen and we don't have one of those in stock.

  I have been sitting out in my truck for the last hour and a half and nothing has been done

Well I tried but it was going to break ....

And it didn't occur to yo to come out and get me ... I drive a big truck branded with "Motorola" on it I am quite visible.

Oh and by the way it is now going to be $150 to repair it inside of the $102 originally quoted.


Upset I am ... I do not for one minute think it took him an hour and a half to figure out that he was going to be unable to do the repair ...

[Chiron]

Upset I am ... I do not for one minute think it took him an hour and a half to figure out that he was going to be unable to do the repair ...

Some people can barely reach the concept of something hazy called 'self', imagine if they manage to to conceive that there could be other 'selves' outside...
Of course mass extermination is both illegal and immoral, but perhaps selective (ex)termination...

[Jherrith]

Valid point I keep forgetting the "younger generation" has no understanding of anyone or anything beyond their rose tinted glasses ....


No doubt we do need some chlorine in the gene pool ... as in a lot

[Jherrith]

Well, it got even better this morning when I grabbed the phone for the off to work I go  ... a quarter of the screen was black as in not visible, shot to hell ... so on and so forth.

When I got to work and was relating the tale to the other guy whose was already there it went completely dark ... can see nothing period so

Boy howdy one would think the tech at the place I took it for repair would have just not bothered with trying to repair since he already knew things were going to be dicey to start with ...

When ye ole boss came in, I showed him what happened told him how long it was going to take for them to fix it and the additional cost to do so ... and got the "order a new phone now" directive.
Why do we have to take the long way round who the frell knows ... could have avoided this if they would have just replaced it from the first instead of being cheap and try to get it repaired ...

The real fun is that I cannot do my time card since I have that two step authentication rig-a-ma-role I have to go through when I log in, and the code is sent to the phone that just died. And if I try to send it to the personal phone they want to take it over because they will think it has proprietary info on it .... in my case, not likely I am a bottom feeder, but whatever.

Then just to round out a perfect "damn what am I going to lose" off of this phone since I have no way to access a damn thing on it .... ... oh great I have a note pad file on it with all of the gate codes for the sites and a list of my passwords to log into the various places I have to go, which have to be updated every so often ...

I would say I am loving life now but that would be a lie.

[Jherrith]

Now off to the races today .... went to ye ole hospital chain to reprogram 10 each radio's.

Want to guess how many radio's were there when I arrived?

If you guessed way over 10 and not all of the same model type .... move to the head of the class.

Got to love accurate information given to the rep setting the service call up ... nope, not blaming him at all for the inaccurate information.

The real fun is that of the 15 radio's they did bring to be worked on by me, surprisingly three had all of the required features needed to upgrade the code plug.

By end of day turns out I was short one feature on two radios.

Not to bad considering the right hand (hospital) and left hand (sale rep) do not speak the same language.

As in they do not know what they truly have, in regards to the full number of subscriber radio's ...


  889 ... as of today.

Been a decided lack of inventory management for some little time .. well at least till I brought out the CDO hammer ... that is ....

Yep, I am so OCD, that I put the letters in alphabetical order.