Post by Adrian CasperszPost by Liz TuddenhamSix months into my new job I was 'loaned' back to my old employer to
help sort out an external contractor who had taken on one of my jobs and
had suddenly discovered he had bitten off more than he could chew. I
don't think he ever got the system working again.
On my last day somewhere, they made me to do a handover of the system
and its operation to someone that was leaving the following day. I kid
ye not....
I can well believe it.
About 80% of the job I did was based on biology and the psychology of
the people using the equipment. The easy 20% was the hardware which
consisted of cam timers, pneumatic valves, relays and hidden
magnetically-latching relays that 'remembered' the sequence of events
and defeated any attempt to do something stupid that might put the
animals at risk.
The management decided that I was too old-fashioned and should have used
computer-driven software, so they made me redundant and brought in an
outside software contractor. He thought he had an easy job, replacing
each relay, one-for-one with a logic switch ... until he went to
re-wire the relay panel and found all sorts of hidden interconnections
whose purpose he didn't understand. I explained to him that these were
to protect against the stupidity of the management and he had better
incorporate similar interlocks in his system, otherwise he was going to
be held responsible for an awful lot of damage.
The next surprise was that he had been told that the local switches had
to be removed and the system would be controlled entirely remotely from
an office in another building. The girl who cleaned out twice a day
would have to run up and down to the office 20 times, to operate each
channel - and she would have to shower and change clothes each time to
avoid bringing contamination into the building. It turns out the
management had never asked the cleaning girl what her job involved.
The point at which he finally gave up all hope was when he asked me
about the power supply to equipment in a wet room. It was 35 volts,
two-phase, for reasons of safety; he asked where I bought the
transformer and I said I had wound it myself - as he would have to do if
he wanted to power his own equipment in that room.
--
~ Liz Tuddenham ~
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