All day at the office trying to fix a bit of kit and never got to fix/test my fix because I ended up with a whole day of whack-a-mole problems with testing equipment not working and then the equipment to fix that equipment not working.
Turtles Problems all the way down.
in the old days when telephone exchanges (well the older ones) still needed a lot of tweaking and fettling to carry on working we had machines that routinely tested every ‘switch’ every night that were imaginatively called Routiners. The exchange I was working in at the time of this story had 4 of these routines each covering four or five thousand ‘switches’. (A switch in this context is a single two motion selector which selects routing for one digit in a telephone number). Anyhoo, these routiners ran overnight testing each switch with a number of discrete tests before moving on to the next switch. If a switch failed one of the (26 or so) tests the routiner printed of a docket with the details. Our first job of the day was to attend to these faults, testing and repairing as required. The routiners were the same level of tech as the switches, namely discrete relays, wire wound resisters and electromechanical movements. 2000 type Strowger really was a joy to work on, I digress.
You now have a bit of background (get on with it: Ed)
On the morning in question we met up with our vending machine coffee at the TO(A)s (the team leader) desk and collected out stack of dockets. You’d normally expect the 15 or so I had that morning. One of my colleagues had hundreds of dockets, each one marked sequencaly with the switch ID and every one the same fail code. The docket printer had run out of dockets and the routiner stopped. The night shift guys hadn’t bothered to reload the printer and restart the routiner for obvious reasons. Well, obvious to most of us. There was much banter at said colleagues expense because fixing routiners can be a bugger of a job. Even the To(A) commiserated with the chap. We all wander off to or sections to get on with the day. At some point during the afternoon there’s some banter going on as we’ve finished the routiner work and we’re doing some routine maintenance or whatever our tasks are that week. Apart from docket boy. So we wander over to see how he’s getting on faulting and fixing his routiner.
He’s on about his 17th switch, which he’s struggling to adjust to get it to pass the routiner test. He’s complaining because the switches he’s already adjusted to pass the routiner keep failing in service and causing alarms and he keeps having to go and reset them to clear the alarms. That, he says, is making it difficult to focus on fixing the switches.
I liked the guy, he was good company, but I really didn’t think anyone could be that stupid and actually get a job in an exchange. It was about this time that I started to realise that I wasn’t actually the idiot I’d been lead to believe. Well, that is until I arrived at the R&D establishment and became surrounded by some seriously clever people.
