6/13/06

Geez! You’d think it was Friday the 13^th the way my day has gone! Ok, here’s what has happened to me in the last 30 hours. I arrived at work to find two screens dark on the Dance Floor. I had a look at the projectors and saw that one was over its allotted time and needed to have a lamp replaced. The other had shut down prematurely. I tried to re-start that one and was met with a nasty “BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ” noise that I knew meant a ‘sploded bulb. I went back and changed the lamp in the other projector first to get it up and running. I moved back to the one with the ‘sploded lamp and changed it. I fired it up and thought, “Whew, there’s my work done for the day.” I sat at my desk to log on to the computer and heard a loud “POP!” I said to myself, “Self, that was a bad noise!” I went back to look at it and saw that the magic smoke had escaped. You know, once the magic smoke comes out of a piece of electronic equipment, it won’t work any more, right? Anyhoo, I went back to my desk to alert the higher-ups to the situation. About five minutes later a pair of facilities guys came running through my office to look for the smoke. Apparently a detector went off, go figure. They reset it and I asked if they would check the power to that unit since this is the second projector to blow up a lamp in that spot. They checked it and it seemed fine. I spoke to a higher-up and it was decided to not risk another new lamp at this time. This morning I came in to find two other screens, in addition to the one from yesterday, off! I came up and tried to re-start them. They both made the same “BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ” noise. I went down to talk to higher-ups again. It was decided that we would try an experiment. I had received three lamp modules some time back that wouldn’t work. One showed it was over its hours, one wouldn’t light and the third was missing a circuit board. We decided that it wouldn’t hurt us to take the circuit board from the ‘sploded module and install it on the one with no board. If it blew we were no worse off than before was the reasoning. I did that and it fired up. Admittedly, I was a little gun shy pushing the power button but it lit just fine. When that projector had run for some time we decided to go ahead and try the last of the new lamps in the other projector. It lit fine and both are still going. With success under our belts, we got cocky. I went ahead and tried one of the other two modules, mentioned above, in the projector what done ‘sploded a lamp yesterday. It lit and I watched it from afar to make sure it would stay on. I got a call to go do something downstairs so I headed, um, downstairs. By the time o got to the bottom of the stairs and looked in to the Dance Floor, the “Lamp hours are over 1,500” warning was showing on that screen. “Crap!” I said to myself. I went about my business and when I got back, about an hour later, it was off. Sure enough, it was registering over 1,600 hours for that brand new lamp and would not come back on because of it. Have I ever told y’all about these projectors? They shut off at 1,600 hours of usage no matter what is going on with the life of the lamp. NEC won’t tell me how to reset the hour meter either so I'm screwed at 1,600 hours. I'm further screwed if this last lamp doesn’t light. Yeah you guessed it, it didn’t light. It buzzed but not as bad as the really bad units. I informed the higher up through his Blackberry and his reply was, “Bummer.” I laughed out loud! So anyway, that is what has had me hopping for the last two days. I have no car news so I think I'm going to call this rant complete. Have a day.