You see, work started yesterday at 0730 but it didn't finish up until after 2200, which us plain folks know as ten p.m. Mostly, I have been working on some routine record-keeping, repair and housekeeping tasks at the highly-automated, normally-unoccupied Skunk Works North Campus while drawing a schematic of the the new equipment* and "supervising" electricians who needed little supervision, past the basic outline of the work and a half-dozen or so minor problems that cropped up. They were working with 120/208V, three phase, installing a new control box about one person wide. My part of the work necessarily followed theirs, moving various monitoring connections to the new equipment from the old equipment (scarily in a very high current breaker panel where low-voltage telemetry connections ought not be made, or at least not made as my predecessors had made them, on a small budget and without due reference to the National Electrical Code). I'd pretty well worked out the details, but had to trace out a splice box and move things around at telemetry/control IO panels and add a few jumpers in the new equipment; by the time I was done and had cleaned up after myself, it was well past seven p.m.
And wouldn't you know it, one part of the project -- most of it -- only operates after dark. The electricians and I had tested it, blocking the light sensor and seeing it come on, and we'd operated the new, solid-state equipment for fairly long periods of time, but it still had to be verified and one of the mods I'd made replaced a remote meter with a series of status indicators -- for want of a better term, "idiot lights." Those won't work at the far end until I make some software changes, also at the far end. The upshot of all this was that I was going to need to return after the end of civil twilight and make sure the system was running.
Went home, sat down and relaxed, and eventually realized I could bribe Tam into riding along if I offered to get us some drive-by food. Around 9:45, we departed for the North Campus, checked the system on arrival -- so far, so good! -- grabbed dinner (roast beef sandwiches; I still remember when the first Arby's showed up in my corner of the hinterlands and what a treat it was!) and trundled home. I went to bed hours later than has been my recent practice, woke up scary-early, and laid there half-awake until the alarm went off.
Small wonder I'm dizzy. On the other hand, they pay me by the hour and days like yesterday are why.
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* Look, Mr. Device-Builder, I get that we probably don't need to know anything but the I/O connections but really, you sell me something wired point-to-point that I may be working on in the middle of the night, something that has got to be reliable, and you balk about supplying a schematic? Fine.
(Yep, I "greeked" out the details. I can draw it, but the design is not mine to share.) |
2 comments:
" use and misuse of wire colors."
This may be a foggy window into the shop floor. A large manufacturer will likely have something approaching steady-state consumption of supplies, while in a small shop, a supervisor could well ask something like, "Does anyone have the red #22 wire? You were supposed to tell me when it was almost gone."
Smart lady... You 'know' you're going to need that sooner or later! :-)
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