Wednesday, December 05, 2018

Unvacation

     Today and the rest of the week was supposed to be a mini-vacation.  For today, at least, it's been cancelled. 

     There's a thing that hasn't been working, a very background sort of thing that no one notices until it is really needed.  It's been a problem off and on for years and for the last couple of years, it hasn't worked at all.  Because it's so much a background thing, of interest only to Engineering, it's been difficult to much attention to it.  We replaced an expensive and difficult to access component of the thing, and after a very sort stretch of proper function, it hasn't been working at all.

     To troubleshoot all of it, I need the assistance of a couple of specialized trades.  Co-ordinating them has been tricky.

     Yesterday morning, unexpectedly, one of the specialists told me they were going to be available today.  By midday, the other one was scheduled and I'd rescheduled that day of vacation.

     I sure hope we'll be able to get this thing working.

6 comments:

B said...

De-Icing? Tower climbers?

Fuzzy Curmudgeon said...

Best of luck.

Roberta X said...

Fuzzy, thank you.

B: can't say.

Both of you: good so far. This thing has some scary failure modes, though, and I won't relax until it has cycled on and off automatically a few times.

JayNola said...

Whisker sensor arrays on the bow trans-warp field generators?

Roberta X said...

Pretty much -- the ternary degausser, which is at the output of the [CLASSIFIED], right after the ion trap. Kept blowing the breaker every time the automatic control kicked on. Thought we had a winding out of phase but it was either a wiring problem that caused contactor (high-current relay) problems or the contactor was the problem. Cleaned and burnished the contacts are replaced the wiring. So far, it's working.

Zendo Deb said...

This post reminds me a saying taped to a co-workers display, oh so many years ago.

"We, who have done so much, with so little, for so long, are now qualified to do anything with nothing."

At some point I decided that I cared more about keeping things running than my boss or their boss... When you come to that realization, it sucks.