It's November, and Thanksgiving is just around the corner. If you're a Detroit Lions football fan, like me, Thanksgiving is yet another day filled with bobbles, fumbles and other amusing mis-cues. Real-life technical fumbles seemed like an appropriate topic for this month. You won't find these on reality TV, though. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.
We were asked to trouble-shoot a CCTV system in a Top 100 market a couple of years ago. The video had numerous intermittent problems, which are such a joy to track down. We spent the better part of a day looking at cameras, video jumpers, fiber optic jumpers, video matrix switches and so on down the list. We finally found the culprit. Someone had spliced together some cut fibers with an assortment of adhesives, including Scotch tape and duct tape!
We were asked to give a book keeper's PC a checkup as part of a larger job in a church. The PC in question had been in use for five years. In those five years, no service patches for WIN98, Internet Explorer 5.0, or the anti-virus software had ever been downloaded! This PC was on the Internet on a regular basis, & yet never suffered once from a malicious attack. I still shake my head whenever I think about it.
A friend of mine was asked to trouble shoot a wireless data link. It worked great in January when it was put in, but had started to fade in April. By June it was out entirely. My friend found out that the installation crew had aimed the link right through a large oak tree! (Microwaves tend to get eaten by trees, especially in the 5.8GHz band.)
My personal favorite is a request for repair that showed up in the AV department at a NCAA Division 1 school. It said, "Tape recorder does not work in the 'O-F-F' mode." Funny thing is, a lot of people have to think about that before they catch on!
And finally, no column honoring Technical Turkeys would be complete without a Top Ten list. Here are the Top 10 Scariest Things We've Heard on the Job:
10) "What else could go wrong?"
9) "I deem it to be so."
8) "I don't care if it can't work. Make it work."
7) "The customer is always right, unless I say otherwise."
6) "Just write the quote. Worry about how to build it later."
5) "I don't care what you remember, I never said that."
4) "Use this one. It's the cheapest."
3) "What can it hurt?"
2) "How hard can it be?"
1) And, the Number One scariest thing we've heard on the job: "Assume you have line of sight."
Never assume! If you do, you'll find out just how hard it can be. (See the oak tree story above.) As scary or funny as these stories are, situations like these keep us gainfully employed, so we really can't complain. The boss won't listen to us anyway, right?
Go easy on the turkey, & see you next month!
Peter Frahm is a Systems Engineer for Area 51 Consulting in Lansing, Michigan. He specializes in video applications over coaxial cable, TCP/IP and wireless networks.
Full Author Profile -->
PRINT THIS
