Posts by Rtbcomp 63 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Jan 2015
I was helping a colleague install an ATM and there was no hole for the mains cable to go through so we requisitioned one from stores The stores clerk phoned the order in before he realised what he was ordering. Stores staff know a lot of rude words and don't have a sense of humour.
I was offered a redundant reel-to-reel VCR and a load of tapes by an organisation which was a medical research establishment - I left the tapes behind.
I had a few customers who used DataEase and if I needed a copy of the database I exported and deleted credit card details first, although I retained names and addresses. This about was 40 years ago, I'm not sure if that would be OK today.
"It was interesting to see the 'Swiss roll' interior of an electrolytic capacitor all unfurled."
Many moons ago I connected the cathode bypass capacitor the wrong way round on an amplifier I was building. There was a pop and the room looked like it was experiencing a snowstorm for the next 5 minutes.
I used to build PCs trading as RTB Computer Services. One day I got a phone call asking for a warranty repair. I asked the guy his name, it didn't sound familiar so I asked for the invoice number, nothing like the same format as mine and he was miles away from where I was.
I told him it was nothing to do with me and he replied "But it says RTB Warranty on the invoice". I can only guess he searched "RTB warranty" and came up with my details.
When I started working as a field service engineer with a company that made cheap and nasty cheque encoders I noticed that some of them had a piece of string hanging from out of the front of the machine.
The machines were based on a mechanical adding machine, the numbers were entered on the keyboard and when the cheque was pushed into a slot the adding machine went through its cycle, being stopped half way by a solenoid to allow the printing mechanism to print the amount on the cheque. The solenoid didn't always release, which resulted in a service call, so some engineers tied a piece of string to the armature so the operator could give it a tug and carry on her merry way.
When I worked in the Bradford area I was summoned to Yorkshire Bank, Otley to fix a fault. I arrived at the bank just as the machine operator was putting the phone down after making the service call.
I revelled in the "Gosh, that was quick" praise until I realised I had gone to Yorkshire Bank, Otley Road, Bradford by mistake, just as they too put a service call in.
I used to be a field service engineer in 1970s working in local branches of most of the UK high street banks. One day the staff sat down to their morning tea and biscuits without offering me one. I downed tools, told the staff if anyone wanted me I'd be in the cafe across the road and off I went. I always got tea and biccies from then on.
I moved off Lotus 1-2-3 when I took a subscription out on Microsoft 365 and started using Excel. I ditched that when I bought a Chromebook and I now use gSheets. Next step is to ditch gsheets and start using 1-2-3 again under Windows,
I was interested in the idea of 1-2-3 being available to run under Linux, maybe I'll give that a try.
Apart from Chrome OS, Linux, Android and Google Sheets, nothing.
The latter seems to like copying and pasting all by itself. To prevent this I have bought a refurbished Dell Win 10 laptop and will be installing Lotus 1-2-3.
The Chromebook will used for my Arduino projects, for which it's quite good.
I was driving from a customer's site back to base to collect some parts and pulled into a lay-by to answer a call of nature. When I got back into the car it wouldn't start. An investigation showed the distributor contacts had closed up. Unfortunately I'd left my tools on site so I had a scout round the lay-by and found a half-brick and a length of steel rod whch I used as a hammer and drift to open the points.
I used to be a repair centre for Sinclair and Amstrad and I had a ZX80 and ZX81 which I used for testing chips &c. These computers were connected to a keyboard I purloined from an MDS Data Recorder when I worked for them. It consisted of magnet-operated reed switches which I rewired to the same configuration of the Sincalir membrane keyboards.
When I gave up that business I put them on Ebay under the title "ZX81 Nailed to a Piece of Wood", and its ghost still haunts the ether (Google the title).
http://www.sinclairlair.co.uk/z80_zx81_wood_news.htm
1) Upgraded a customer to the latest version of MSDOS. Did a backup, installed the new version, did a restore. Only I didn't do a restore because the format of the backups wasn't compatible between the two versions of MSDOS
2) Customer running two business on 2 MSDOS computers using the same software. Unfortunately he was using the same set of floppies for each, so the only backup he had was No2 machine as that backup had overwritten the No1 machine's backup. Luckily he didn't have to restore No1 machine before I discovered what he was doing. Why did he only use one set of disks? Because he was a tight-fisted accountant.
My biggest concern is reliability. We keep hearing stories about bank accounts of innocent people being summarily suspended or closed due to a computer suspecting fraud, how long before people are accused of being called paedophiles because some software says so?
I've just tried to sell a Monopoly game on Ebay, only to have the listing banned because it contains the word "Monopoly" which according to Ebay's computer means I'm selling some sort of gambling product. I got round it by spelling "Monopoly" backwards. It seems to have let thousands of similar listing through though.
I had a house where a two-way light was wired with twin & earth instead of triple & earth, the earth wire being used to carry mains.
The gas boiler put out more fumes than heat.
The guy I bought it off was a fireman! I'm surprised he didn't have the chance to bring his work home with him.
I was very angry, never mind sad, to find my new Samsung printer came with an HP badge, even more so when the installation program on the supplied CD didn't work.
HP is very near the bottom of my preferential suppliers list due to bad service in the past and Samsung is going in a southerly direction very quickly.
I used to generate "INP Error - System Halted" 4 months after any program I wrote was installed. INP standing for "Invoice Not Paid".
Once the customer paid I'd call "to install a patch" to disable this feature.
Fortunately all invoices got paid and the error never occurred.
IIRC in the UK once it's been delivered you can open it because it's no longer in the postal system. Some council somewhere wanted to read a suspected criminal's mail and the only way they could do it was by getting the police to break into the house after the letter had been delivered and picking it up off the doormat!
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