Posts by NITS

Open source router firmware project OpenWrt ships its own entirely repairable hardware

Re: The DFS* Sale Is Now On!

But what's the Sofa King price?

Tech support chap showed boss how to use a browser for a year – he still didn't get it

Re: Thermostats

My current car has the digital controls and displays. It drives me nuts. It over- or under-heats to regulate the cabin temperature to make a small sensor at a location unknown to me, very happy. The "automatic" setting runs the fan at high speed until it catches up; I've learned not to use it. I am forever poking at the up/down rocker (an additional driver distraction) to work around it in an attempt get it to blow air to make me, the driver, comfortable.

What I want is a big knob with an arrow that's blue at one end and red at the other, that I can reach without looking for it, that will tweak the temperature of the air blowing on my face and hands to a comfortable level. Like all the other cars I've previously owned.

Reminds me of that old cartoon with the 6 different versions of a tree and a tire swing.

Yes, your network is down – you annoyed us so much we crashed it

Re: Ways to encourage payment

I once worked for a subsidiary of a Fortune 500 company. We were finding ourselves on credit hold from time to time. Supplier's terms might be 2% 10, net 30. The bean counters would take 60 days, and take the discount besides. We engineers leveled with the salesmen, told them that that was the way of the beancounters, there wasn't any way to change it, and to factor it into their pricing. No more credit holds after that.

At another employer, we found ourselves on credit hold after manglement in their indefinite wisdom acquired another firm, which had markers out all over the place. Failure of "due diligence".

An outfit that I have done contract work for, was acquired. Their standard terms were 60 days, but you could join their Rapid Pay program to get paid in 10 days, with a 2% discount. After the acquisition, they changed it from 10 calendar days to 10 business days, and changed the terms from 2% to "whatever the XXX mortgage interest rate index is". But the mortgage rate index is per-annum, and they were applying it to a 46-day period. It worked out to something like 161% APR when I did the math. Usurious! I'll wait the 60 days, thanks.

Techie took five minutes to fix problem Adobe and Microsoft couldn't solve in two weeks

I've run into that scenario several times. Most recently, it was a 2.5 hour drive to the site, an extra 1mm shove on a patch cord end until it clicked, then the link light came on. I ended up replacing the patch cable anyway, because the clip had taken a set due to having been depressed to the extreme and not allowed to spring back into the latched position. Then, another 2.5 hour drive back to the office.

A pet peeve of mine is when a device's power brick has an IEC22 plug, there's no shelf or other convenient support, so the weight of the power brick was left dangling from the mains cord, resulting in disconnection of the power cord. Velcro's your friend!

I had one the other day where a switch was down in a hotel. The IDF had an electronic keycard door lock that had malfunctioned. There was no physical key, just the electronic lock. We ended up using burglars' tools to get in: a stiff wire fished under the door, bent to be able to snag the lever knob on the inside and let us in. The switch was down because there was no power to either of its redundant power supplies. Both of the power cords were sourced from the same UPS, which was not working. I unplugged the UPS from the wall outlet to verify that the outlet was live (it was), and plugged it back in. It started on its own, and the switch came up. Moreover, there were 4 switches, and 4 UPSes, in that IDF. They were all connected identically, such that the UPS was a single point of failure for its switch. I offered to replug the switches to diversify the power sourcing, but the client said to leave it as it was. I would not be surprised to get another callout to this site.

Crack coder wasn't allowed to meet clients due to his other talent: Blisteringly inappropriate insults

Re: The C bomb

Was his name Bruce?

Client tells techie: You're not leaving the country until this printer is working

Early departure

It was, if I recall correctly, a Christmas Eve several decades ago. I was heading out from Maryland to a destination in South Florida to support the opening of the winter meet of a hippodrome. I was booked on the last flight of the evening. I had with me 9 boxes of plastic admission passes -- like credit cards, but different -- for the meet, which I had picked up at the manufacturer and was transporting as checked luggage. Uncharacteristic of me, I arrived at the airport hours early. The plan was that my SO would drop me and my stuff at the curb, go and park the Microbus while I checked in with the airline, and we would enjoy a relaxed casual meal at one of the airport's restaurants, since I would be away for the actual holiday.

When I got to the check-in counter, the monitor was showing that my intended flight was canceled. The agent confirmed this, "but we can get you on the earlier flight, if you hurry!" This was several decades ago, so no TSA. Also no mobile phone, so no way to contact my SO. They threw my boxes and luggage on the baggage belt, didn't take the time to process the excess-baggage fees. I said "Do me a favor. In a few minutes, a young lady will come here looking to meet me. Would you please explain to her what happened?" With that, I sprinted toward the gate.

The relationship survived.

Hello? Are you talking on a Cisco SPA300 or SPA500 IP phone? Now's the time to junk 'em

Re: Replace the phone?

A Western Electric 300-series phone would not have this issue, either.

Hello? Emergency services? I'd like to report a wrong number

Re: Decades ago...

Decades ago, in at least some parts of North America, the telcos assigned coin-operated public telephones numbers in the 9xxx block. They did not allow collect calls to be made to a coin phone. The 9xxx phone number was a red flag to the operator. When I made a collect call from the college dorm's hall phone to my parents, there would be an additional delay as the originating Bell of Pennsylvania operator would have to verify with Chesapeake and Potomac that my parents' landline, 647-9046, was NOT a coin box before completing the collect call. I found that if I included the phrase "and no, it's not a coin box, it's my parents' home phone" in my initial request to set up the call, they would take my word for it and skip the time-consuming verification step.

Easton, Pennsylvania still had an electromechanical telephone exchange in those days; I believe that it was the step-by-step variety using Strowger switches. There was a wonderful (to my ears) cacaphony of clicks, clacks, and buzzes audible outside the telephone exchange building. I regret not having thought to ask if our electrical engineering department could arrange a tour of it.

Facebook prank sent techie straight to Excel hell

Re: Same prank, but for teenagers

Some years ago our tween son was doing home school. Part of it was online. More-that-a-bit obsessed with all things LEGO, he kept visiting sites like lego.com when supposedly doing school. A few entries added to the hosts file put an end to that.

I've since confessed to having done it.

Humanity's satellite habit could end up choking Earth's ozone layer

Re: The nice thing about low-orbit constellations

Nobody made an inflatable autopilot reference yet? OK. I will!

Techie installed 'user attitude readjustment tool' after getting hammered in a Police station

Shepherd's crook...

... is what I call it. One of those metal sticks, about a meter long, with an S bend at the far end, and a wooden handle, that shop staff use to hang and retrieve merch from a tall hook on a display wall. Useful for fetching wires, and also for steering fiberglass cable-running sticks through that J-hook that you just can't reach.

Also useful: a 10-ft length of steel sash chain, for fishing cable down a wall cavity. Hole above the ceiling line for cable entry, another at the equipment mounting point. Attach cable end to the top, dangle the chain down the wall cavity, and use a magnet to retrieve it.

But wait, there's more! A traffic cone, to manage cable at the corner where the cable path turns. Walk it out to length on the floor, coil it up using the sound techs' over-and-under technique, lay the coil over the cone. It feeds off without kinking. Repeat as required at the next corner(s) of the cable path.

Screwdrivers: is there anything they can't do badly? Maybe not

Re: That sounds like

I've installed alarm systems. One way to test a glass-break detector is to whack its mounting surface with a screwdriver handle, and immediately shake a ring full of keys near its microphone. It takes the combination of low- and high-frequency (maybe ultrasonic?) sounds to trigger it.

We need a volunteer to literally crawl over broken glass to fix this network

Standing tall

Was told to bring a 10ft stepladder to a gig the other day. I could just barely reach the switch by standing on its tippy-top; a 12-footer would have been much safer (and OSHA-compliant). I survived my venture into "la zona de muerta". The rack was firmly attached to the wall, so I had a decent handhold at least.

I didn't touch a thing – just some cables and a monitor – and my computer broke

Re: IT Crowd

CP/M systems, 8 inch floppies written at a particular field site would not read at the office. The (full-height) drives had AC motors. In the field we had 10KVA inverters (double-bay cabinet, batteries big enough to run a forklift). The inverters had a free-running oscillator that ran close enough to 60 Hz for most purposes, but the disk spindle rotation speed was sufficiently off that the data couldn't be recovered in a system powered by the mains. Our solution at the office was to power the B drive off the mains,and power the A drive off an audio oscillator, which drove a 100-watt PA amplifier via a step-up transformer. Adjusted the gain to get 120V, tweaked the oscillator frequency until the floppy would read. Then PIP B:=A:*.* for the win.

Later systems had half-height drives with DC motors and their own timebase, so the issue went away.

Bad vibrations left techie shaken up during overnight database rebuild

My high school (class of '71 here) had a 1401 computer, and the 1403 printer, and the card reader / punch (I forget its model number). There was a program that would play music on the 1403.

Place I worked at had field sites that used 900 line/minute Dataproducts drum printers. 3-copy greenbar carbon paper. They'd run them without the covers. The systems printed for a few seconds every minute. Most of the reports went right into 55-gallon plastic Rubbermaid trash cans parked behind the printers, but could be retrieved if required. There were a few pages that were used, printed as an event went off. They were pulled off and handed to the customer. The system printed longer reports at end-of-day. The covers might be closed then. Many of the operators seemed partially deaf from exposure to the noise from the open printers.

Each site had a decollator (remember those?) to separate the pages and the carbons.

My employer had been quite loyal to Dataproducts, but when they switched from towel ribbons to cartridge ribbons, the latter proved unreliable. So when the Centronics salesman showed up one day, and he had (formerly CDC) band printers with towel ribbons in his catalog, we jumped on that.

Our next-generation systems used laser printers.

Re: Braille machine

I once worked at a place that had one of those to accommodate a blind programmer. The Braille printer appeared to be based on a daisywheel printer. It had a single stylus and embossed the dots into fanfold tractor-feed card stock. It was loud, even with its accoustical enclosure's cover closed.

Re: SSDs [Dot-Matrix Printers]

60 characters per line / 10 characters per second = 6 seconds per line, or 10 lines per minute.

Software support chap survived breaking his customer

Just a couple of weeks ago a chap I know closed a months-old ticket concerning a user's repeated corruption of the config files for a particular mission-critical application. The vendor's support folks hadn't been able to figure it out. In the log files it became apparent that a proper Windows shutdown was not occurring. Not only was the user failing to exit the application, he was in the habit of pressing-and-holding the power button to shut down his machine at the end of the day. It was faster that way, and nobody had ever told him not to do it that way, so why not?

Help! My mouse climbed a wall and now it doesn't work right

Re: It goes the wrong way!

I would use the mouse left-handed at the office, and right-handed at home, to equalize the carpal-tunnel wear.

Do not touch that computer. Not even while wearing gloves. It is a biohazard

deli floors

Some of my least-favorite calls were to remediate issues with a weighing-and-labeling scale having gone offline in the deli department of a big-box store. The usual cause was a corroded network jack under the deli case, Sometimes it was green corrosion on the jack and/or plug. Sometimes it was corroded wires on the punchdown side of the jack.

Access to the underneath of the deli case requires lying on the floor, removing the toe-kick plate, and reaching in to the area under the case where the grey slime ends up when they wash the floor. They pretend to seal the junction with the floor with silicone caulk, but it never adheres. It's always yucky down there.

McDonald's ordering system suffers McFlurry of tech troubles

fast food

Why do they call it fast food? Because they make you fast before you get your food.

If we plug this in without telling anyone, nobody will know we caused the outage

BNC connectors

Not inherently bad. Just certain kinds. The 75 ohm ones used in CCTV, mostly legacy now, I think. The modern compression type are pretty good. But I run into the older hex-crimp ones that were applied with the wrong tooling. They go bad (or were bad, just not detected). And there's a special corner in a very hot place reserved for anyone who thought that making, or using, the ones that don't crimp at all, they just have a female screw thread to capture the shield. I find those causing problems a lot. I can imagine the marketing speil: Easy to apply! Saves time! No tooling! No crimping! Just twist on and go! I think I remember seeing them in Radio Shack blister packs.

Honorable mention: the DVR makers who jam the BNCs so close together that you (or at least I) can't get fingers between them to do up, or undo, the retention rings. I find them unlatched, and the plug having worked its way out, sometimes.

'The computer was sitting in a puddle of mud, with water up to the motherboard'

Deli

Used to get dispatches for $DEVICE OFFLINE in various branches of a big-box store. Wireless access points weren't too bad to deal with, though some of their IDFs were a she-dog to reach. Often, the failed unit was one of the WAPs with external antennas outside the building, with RF cables through a wall penetration to the WAP located in the (theoretically) warm-and-dry interior of the building. The WAP would be mounted on or under the structural steel. I would find the network jack corroded or burned up from water intrusion collecting in it, whether from condensation or from an actual roof leak, and getting sizzled by the PoE power.

For the life of me, though, I can't fathom why Cisco thought it a good idea to put the jacks on the TOP edge of the WAP, when mounted with the logo right-side-up, so that the jack would collect water that ran down the cable. (It's not just Cisco, though; their competition seem to do the same thing. A subtle form of planned obsolescence, perhaps?)

I would try to remount the WAP sideways, or make a plastic-bag tent to prevent recurrence.

The absolute worst calls were for failed connections to scales in the deli. The LAN cables run under the customer-facing display/cooler cases. There was at least one jack-and-plug located under the case, perhaps more if the scale had been moved from its original location or the cable had been serviced previously. Access to under the case requires lying on the floor and removing a toe kick plate, which often showed evidence of attempts to silicone-caulk it to the floor. The caulk was not usually intact, and in any event was not intact after I removed the access plate. There was usually a grey slime under the case, washed there from cleaning the tile floor. Not a great place to be working. Wet environment, corrosion, etc., etc., the fault was often due to corrosion at the interface between the cat5 cable and the punchdown terminals on the jack. The repair itself was not so bad, just punching on a new jack and/or plug and replacing a patch cord. But the grey slime -- yuck!

Bank boss hated IT, loved the beach, was clueless about ports and politeness

Re: bullshit detected

What does NOT work is using a 4P4C (4 position, 4 conductor) handset cord modular connector instead of a 6P2C RJ11 plug.

1. The handset connector has pointy contacts designed to penetrate a tinsel or stranded wire, different from the contacts for solid wire that penetrate the insulation and straddle the solid conductor, capturing it in a fork. They may appear to work for a while, but they stub against a solid wire and do not make a gas-tight connection. Time and environmental factors, or mechanical manipulation, will cause them to fail open.

2. The 4P handset connector, while it may insert and latch into an RJ11 socket, does not have enough support and can rotate about the cable axis, causing an open circuit.

I've seen this (and replaced the connectors to repair it) in several branches of a department-store chain, where they converted from POTS trunking to VOIP, installing ATAs (Analog(ue) Telephone Adapters) to provide dialtone to their legacy phone system. The ATAs were built to a budget, of course, and their RJ11 sockets had only the 2 required center contacts. So the handset plugs were not as well supported as they would have been if used in a 6P4C or 6P6C socket. Found this condition several times on callouts for "Line 3 is dead" and such.

I know, they now make (and I have used) mod ends with contacts intended to work with either solid or stranded wire. But these were not that type.

IT work can be a lot like janitorial work, cleaning up other people's messes.

Lawyer guilty of arrogance after ignoring tech support

Re: GIF pronunciation controversy

When doing field support (a.k.a."monkey with a screwdriver") I am always careful to refer to the Wide-Area Network port and the Local-Area Network port in so many words when talking with the customer's support desk, to avoid the ambiguity of the similar-sounding acronyms.

Re: @Korev "Well the Z in Regomised is still there..."

"This is... the news... in Special English... from the Voice of America... in Washington."

Police ignored the laws of datacenter climate control

Re: Location?

Department store I've called on has their IDF located in either the shoe stockroom, or the ladies' lingerie fitting room, depending on the branch.

Pool supplies shop

Copper networks corrode away. Been asked more than once to replace an entire cable run, including jacks and patch cords.

I don't think that they get 3 years out of a PC, either.

Hot server rooms

A department store, several branches of which I have had occasion to visit, does not provide dedicated aircon to their server rooms. Rather, they see fit to install an outlet from the building's main HVAC system. Maybe, in theory, it worked OK when first installed; I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. But over time, Stuff Happens -- more equipment added to the MDF room, duct gets disconnected, system becomes unbalanced for some other reason. More than once, I've walked into one of their rooms and found it rip-off-all-your-clothes hot. I suggest to manglement that they *really* should get their Facilities folks to address the situation, and they say "Oh, it's always like that!"

Re: Is the Sahara Desert still there?

I seem to recall reading that in the days of Desert Storm there was high demand for circumcisions among GIs that hadn't had the procedure early in life, because that fine sand gets *everywhere*.

No, no, no! Disco joke hit bum note in the rehab center

I use the monophonic "Nokia Tune" on my Motorola. Nobody else uses it anymore. I can instantly tell that it's my phone that's ringing, vs. somebody else's. And it's not *too* obnoxious (YMMV).

How is this problem mine, techie asked, while cleaning underground computer

Dollar stores

Under the manager's desk in a dollar store. The CCTV camera power supplies are there, along with the UPS for the DVR. That area *never* gets cleaned, and is always disgusting.. Once got sent to a store for an unlocatable screech. Somebody'd plugged a space heater into the UPS, causing it to go into alarm. It had been sounding its alarm continuously for 17 days, they told me. Unplugging and replugging it cleared the alarm.

Stockroom of a dollar store. Got sent to one on a Saturday because the alarm panel had lost power. The area was piled high with random boxes that they'd tossed there while unloading a truck. I could barely see the alarm panel, let alone get to its power source. Told them that if they couldn't clear a path that day (which they couldn't; chronically understaffed), to call back when they'd removed the freight. Went back on the Tuesday. Sure enough, a box had knocked the wall wart out of its socket. Suggested that they lean a pallet or board there to forestall recurrence.

Another time in a dollar store, the place was awash in rain water. Old multistory building, store was on the ground floor. I doubt that there were other tenants. The roof leaked. Rainwater would percolate down through the building, creating a nasty mess and odor every time it rained. Landlord had refused to fix the roof. A customer had reported them to the Health Department. They'd voluntarily closed to forestall a formal order to do so, which would have created more of a paper trail.

Chap blew up critical equipment on his first day – but it wasn't his volt

Re: "They're able to plug any lead into any socket."

I did that without breaking anything, back when VGA was a New Thing. Unlike the DE9 which preceded it, the 3-row pin configuration of the HD-15 VGA connector is perfectly symmetrical. I was able to mate it the wrong way around. The outer shell of the male connector was flexible enough that it didn't present an obstacle; it just re-formed the D in the opposite direction to conform to the socket I pushed it onto. When I phoned support to report a DOA monitor, they knew to tell me to flip it over the right way. So, in my defense, I wasn't the first to have made the same error.

Re: "They're able to plug any lead into any socket."

USB-B fits into a network jack quite well, without forcing -- as I (re)discovered last week when reconnecting a printer by feel.

Lock-in to legacy code is a thing. Being locked in by legacy code is another thing entirely

Almost climbed a fence

A colleague and I worked late at a sports venue in Kentucky. The building was dark and locked. We found our way to a fenced-in garden area and were contemplating whether it was a good idea to climb the fence to exit. A security guard happened by. We explained ourselves to him, and he asked "You in that fo-wid?" After requesting a couple of repeats, it dawned on me: "Oh, Ford! Yes, my rental car is a Ford!"

(I grew up in a suburb of New York City, where fo-wid was the opposite of back-wid. So my ears were not well-attuned to his accent.)

Anyway, he sprung us without further ado.

vehicle detectors

Back when I was using my road bike regularly I found that induction loop vehicle detectors for left-turn lanes would often fail to trip. Partially dismounting the bicycle and laying it parallel to the road surface for a few seconds, usually did the trick.

Don't know what you'd do in this situation with one of those fancy carbon fiber framed bikes -- carry a trash can lid? Kinda defeats the purpose. Weight reduction is a fine thing, but as someone once wrote, if you have to carry a 20-pound chain to keep your 20-pound (9-ish kg?) bike from getting stolen, you might as well ride a 40-pound bike.

A few decades ago when I lived in Baltimore, the city used ultrasonic vehicle detectors. They broadcast a chirp that was annoying to those of us whose hearing extended to higher frequencies than it does now. Rumor was that they had a theft problem, because the transducers made excellent tweeters for your stereo.

Douglas Adams was right: Telephone sanitizers are terrible human beings

tone and tag

Did a recent gig where a mall anchor store in City A had lost the POTS line to its intrusion alarm. The place has been around for a few decades and has lots of copper pairs installed. Lots of 66 blocks. 200 pairs, to be exact, of which maybe 12 pair are still in use. They must have had Centrex back in the day.

Management, located it another state, gave me the list of numbers that they thought were in use for their various burglar and fire alarms at this store. I was to tone and test all of them, and report any issues found. I did find one that was not working, and reported it so they could have the Local Exchange Carrier (LEC), fancy word for what we used to call "the phone company", fix it.

I could not for the life of me find the line that manglement said was for the burg alarm, anywhere on the backboard in the store. Funny thing is, when I dialed the number in question (call it $DN), it rang with no answer and my mobile said I was calling a number in City C, same area code but 3 hours' drive away. I rigged up something temporary so the burglar alarm could use one of the fire alarm's lines to phone home when the fire alarm wasn't using it. Manglement said they'd have another vendor (call them Basalt Telecom) come out to test-and-tag the line in question.

A couple of weeks later I got a call back to City A, this time for a vendor meet with a tech for the alarm company. Turns out that the store had had difficulty arming the alarm because its tamper switch had gone faulty, which the alarm tech mitigated. But to my surprise, the burglar alarm telephone wiring was untouched from my previous visit, and there was no sign of a freshly-tagged $DN on the backboard. I escalated with manglement, who showed me an email from Basalt Telecom saying that they had done a vendor meet with AT&T (the LEC), and they had run a new cable to bring $DN to the store's burglar alarm. Upon further escalation within Basalt, eventually I was given the mobile number for the Basalt tech who'd done the work. I asked him "This was in City A, right?" and he said no, it was in City C, where the phone exchange for $DN is located. I thanked him for confirming my suspicions.

I reported back to manglement that apparently they had some incorrect data in their database, the line in question was in fact located in City C. The alarms in the City A store are still sharing a phone line.

Sigh.

Recent telephone sanitiser gig

I recently had a gig as a telephone sanitiser. A lumber yard had built a new showroom, moved their computers and IP phones to the new place, and their boss was not happy about the dusty/dirty condition of the equipment, including the server cabinet. So yours truly got paid to come in and clean things up. When I phoned the client on arrival to clarify the scope of work, after some back-and-forth I said "so... basically, janitorial work." And he agreed.

I did find a phone that wasn't working, and narrowed it down to a switch port that wasn't delivering PoE. But most of my day was spent wielding paper towels, Windex, Velcro, and electrician's scissors.

The pay's the same. It was less taxing than listening to music-on-hold, interspersed with reminders about "your call is important to us", as happens far too often.

BOFH: Lies, damned lies, and standards

Souh Lake Union Trolley

The South Lake Union Trolley is a light-rail transit line in the Seattle, Washington metropolitan area. According to Google, the last name was officially changed to "streetcar" after the acronym was noticed, but the word was already out.

Fed up with slammed servers, IT replaced iTunes backups with a cow of a file

The hills are alive...

with the sound of moo-sic!

That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse

Re: Hmmm

If I come across a coaxial barrel connector that's got negative on the center terminal, I color the outside of the barrel with red Sharpie felt-tip marker. It doesn't seem to hurt the connectivity, and doubtless has kept some of the magic smoke retained.

I have found it useful to keep a silver Sharpie marker on hand, to write on the black wallwart housings.

If I end up cutting barrel connector cables to mix-and-match size and voltage to equipment, I sometimes use Anderson power pole connectors rather than soldering the leads directly. Makes it easier to adapt to test the next thing.

And I keep a 1270 battery handy with a PowerPole pair on it, in case I need to power something for a few minutes' test where an extension cord would otherwise be required. E.G. a ceiling-mounted CCTV camera, or the small TV/monitor that I use to view its output.

Is there anything tape can’t fix? This techie used it to defeat the Sun

Not all users are idiots

Got a call to troubleshoot the (IP) phone at the fuel center of a chain grocery store. No fault found; the jacks and cabling were fine. The user said that the phone works OK all winter, and only goes bad on rainy days.

Said fuel center is more recently built than the main store and is located a block away (and around the corner, if you're driving) from the main store.

Looked around the IT rack in the fuel center, no landline network connection in sight. Walked outside, there is a microwave-sized antenna on the canopy, aimed at the main store, and an identical antenna on the roof of the main store aimed at the gas station. Line of sight is over a strip mall and past a relatively recently-constructed hotel. Which has trees lining its driveway. Which, no doubt, have grown taller since originally planted. I suspect that the leafy green microwave absorbers become more efficient at that task on rainy days.

The user's seemingly-irrelevant observations clued me in.

Datacenter fire suppression system wasn't tested for years, then BOOM

Re: Ahhhh the

Saw something similarly strange. Ringdown panic phone system in a dollar store. Splices where they shouldn't be.

Three phones: one at the cashwrap, one in the stockroom, one in the office. Each one's supposed to be on its own home run cable. They weren't; the office phone was tapped into the stockroom phone's cable.

The phones have an audio connection, and a connection to the alarm panel that signals when the handset's lifted off the hook. Each phone's supposed to be on its own zone so the mothership can tell which phone's in use, even if the user's not in a position to talk. They were all wired in parallel instead. The switchhook contacts included. For the talk path, they're normally open, so that's OK. But the contacts to the alarm system are normally-closed. So the alarm wasn't getting tripped when a handset was lifted.

Moreover, the wire colors in the blue-jacketed Cat5 cable to the cashwrap phone magically changed colors from one end to the other. I toned and traced the cable in the ceiling. Some dimbulb didn't understand the purpose of twisted-pair wiring (cancelling out common-mode noise, e.g. hum). Instead, they'd doubled the copper at a splice in the middle of the ceiling, with pairs subbing for individual wires. So it was white/blue to blue+white, blue/white to green+white, etc. I put it back to twisted-pair all the way.

I eventually got it sorted. And labeled the snot out of the weird stuff that remained, to help the next person who has to deal with it.... who might just be me.

Shocks from a hairy jumper crashed a PC, but the boss wouldn't believe it

plastic seats

Some time ago I was working on the parking-and-admissions system for an entertainment venue. The terminals had been reliable when originally deployed in Florida, but were prone to crashing when installed at a newly-rebuilt venue in New Jersey. Turns out that the agents had smart, new, polyester uniforms. They were seated on smart, new stools with plastic seats and plastic-tipped metal legs. When they'd scoot their bum against the stool's seat, static electricity would be generated. The solution was to provide conductive plastic seat covers, and remove the plastic tips from the legs, so that the stools were (sorta) grounded to the stone floors in the admissions booths. After that, no problems.

Botched migration resulted in a great deal: One for the price of two

Re: The opposite problem

My employer decades ago had become owned by a Fortune 500 conglomerate. We were having trouble getting parts because suppliers kept putting us on credit hold. If the terms were 2% 10 days, net 30, the bean counters were taking 60 days to pay, and taking the discount anyway. We engineers ended up telling suppliers that our hands were tied, and to factor these circumstances into their price quotes.

This was the same outfit that told us that out pension plan was more generous than the rest of $BIGCO, so in the name of "making things fair" they were terminating it for those of us with less than 10 years' tenure, and we could fund our own 401Ks.

This was also the same outfit that called us into a meeting, and basically said that they'd been looking at the revenue per employee, and since the numerator wasn't looking exciting, they'd decided to change the denominator. In other words, layoffs were about to happen.

This was the same outfit that, despite 50 years of hard work by generations of employees, having achieved 90% market share, fell to #3 in the industry over the course of the next 15 years under these manglers. They used us as a cash cow to fund their other misadventures.

Permanently Closed

I recently had a ticket to update a wireless modem at a car rental office; call them $cps. Got to the site, a bit confused since the signage was down (mostly). Went inside, talked to the peeps. They said that $cps had closed up and moved out more than a year previously. The premises was now the rental office for the car dealership next door. $cps' network and phone equipment was still in place and active, and (presumably) being paid for.

But wait, there's more!

The agent told me that they still get $cps customers walking in their door, wanting to pick up the rental car that they had recently reserved. Even though $cps had folded up and moved out of the office a year previously, at least some part of their reservation system still thought that the site was active, not Permanently Closed.

Errors logged as 'nut loose on the keyboard' were – ahem – not a hardware problem

I am surprised that noone's mentioned the 4 Bruces.

Re: Take aways

I had found that, at a certain fast food place ("Les Arcs d'Or"), if all I want is a coffee, it was much faster to go inside and order it at the counter, rather than waiting in the drive-through queue. Given that that is the only item in my order, it got filled immediately, often by the order-taker. Recently, it seems, they have a separate drink-making specialist, so I may have to wait longer than previously. But it still seems faster than waiting in the single queue behind folks who want 17 Happy Meals or whatever.

"Why do they call it fast food? Because they make you fast before you get your food!" always gets a chuckle from other patrons waiting at the pick-up station.

A tip for content filter evaluators: erase the list of sites you tested, don't share them on 100 PCs

Back in the dialup days we were engaged in setting up Internet access for small son's school. Got "interesting" results when researching the SOCKS web proxy.

Whatever floats your boat...

A couple of years later we had moved house (and cities) and were homeschooling, part of which was online. Said (now tween) son was obsessed with plastic bricks, to the extent that schoolwork was not getting done. Imagine his chagrin after I edited the hosts file to redirect lego.com to 127.0.0.1