Several years ago I worked for a company that serviced grocery store cash registers, which basically meant a cheap WinXP box with a bunch of serial port cards plugged in, because while there were USB receipt printers and cash drawers and scales and scanners and credit card accepters and so on, they were an expensive replacement for parts that mostly worked just fine.
The hardest part wasn't the tech, it was the carpentry. Or dealing with the carpentry. Most tech problems we field techs solved by swapping out parts to get the register back up ASAP and then sending the parts back to our home office to be fixed by the techs there.
But still, troubleshooting skills are useful to have, and apparently one of my predecessors didn't bother actually trying to troubleshoot anything.
A few weeks after I started the job I got a call from a store reporting that their #5 register was down AGAIN.
$me = me
$manager = manager
I get on site.
$me: What do you mean "again", has this register been down before?
$manager: It goes down every month, they replace it and it works for a few weeks then it quits again. I think there may be evil spirits lurking under the counter there.
$me: ha, well, I'll see if I can perform an exorcism.
I pull off the access panel and poke my head under the counter. Grocery store under counter areas are often really disgusting. Part of our job as field techs was preventative maintenance to keep them clean enough not to kill the computers, and this wasn't really bad. Dusty as all hell, but otherwise ok.
I check the computer and sure enough, it bluescreens when I try to boot. I check the box and find it is plugged, not into the UPS it is supposed to be plugged into, but into a standard power outlet. It is not alone in that outlet.
Sharing the outlet with the computer is the endcap Coke refrigerator, an extension cord powering the endcap Pepsi refrigerator for the next checkout line, AND an extension cord leading to a nearby Coke vending machine.
Three nice, big, motors to surge the shit out of the computer every time they started up. I'm surprised each replacement computer had lasted even a month.
I plugged the new PC into the UPS, made sure the UPS was plugged into an outlet that at least wasn't directly attached to all the refrigerator motors, and explained to $manager that computers usually didn't like being plugged into the same circuit as big electrical motors and that's why it had been crashing.
I'm still not sure if my predecessor there had just been lazy, was dumb as a bag of hammers, or what.
Submitted June 08, 2016 at 09:22PM by sotonohito http://ift.tt/1XEBlRt talesfromtechsupport
No comments:
Post a Comment