On Nov 22, 18:04, Bill Pechter wrote:
> Boy the number of 4:55pm calls on Friday used to really %R$^& me off
> including the one a printer at Roche medicalwhere the customer shimmed
the
> ribbon path with test tube lids and left scalpul blades in the LP25 when
I
> got sent out to work it.
>
> The printer was obviously having problems for at least a day or so
> before they finished their medical test runs -- but they waited to call
> until it was completely unreadable.
Sounds like one I had to deal with when I worked for a third-party
maintenance company. I was trained on Q-bus and mostly worked in the
regional workshop, but I did a few fill-ins on other stuff. Anyway, one
afternoon I was sent out to the head office of a well-known bank in
Edinburgh, to deal with a printer (not on normal contract, but a
fix-on-fail pay-per-fix deal). I was ushered into a room with four middle
managers, one of whom was highly resentful that the Epson FX80 on his PC AT
had stopped working, and even more resentful that someone was going to get
in his way in order to fix it :-)
The problem was simple -- it was so clogged with paper dust that the head
couldn't move all the way to the margin. I don't just mean there was a lot
of dust on the carriage and bars, the case was *full*. I politely
suggested the owner might like to clean it (or have it cleaned)
periodically, and got a stream of invective about how he'd complained it
was making his printouts dusty, it was my problem not his, he was far too
busy to ever do anything of the sort, and it was a maintenance company's
job anyway. Well, I though of showing him the page in the manual about
user maintenance, but it would obviously have been a lost cause...
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Dept. of Computer Science
University of York
Received on Tue Nov 23 1999 - 18:27:45 GMT