3/20/12

Man, this week sucks… and it’s only Tuesday. My house of cards conglomeration of technology out here is beginning to fall apart. Last Friday I was called to the Viewing Gallery to show someone how to run the system. When I went to show the BNSF Promotional Video, it cut off the first half of the first sentence. I reset everything and tried again with the same result. I went into the back room and ejected the DVD to see if it just needed to be re-read. Well, now the damned DVD player won't acknowledge that there is a DVD in there. I get a “No Disc” message. I tried a different disc, just in case it was that. Nope, same error. So I had to stay and babysit the meeting and manually run the promo video. Then my “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” disc screwed up over the weekend, pissing me off even more. Monday morning I went into the TOB Large Conference room expecting to see that the folks were all set and ready to go only to find that they couldn’t get the video up. Something had gone tits-up in the console. I erroneously traced it to an interface and bypassed it. It worked. Of course after leaving the room I realized it wasn’t that interface but a switcher ahead of it that was bad. Today I went in and reconnected the interface but the switcher still needs to be replaced. After that, I got a call saying that a projector in the AOB wouldn’t shut down. I went to check that out. After unplugging it and waiting fifteen seconds, it seemed to reset itself because it worked fine after that. It still pissed me off. Then there’s the Bored Room. Friday I got a call saying that the drapery people are blaming our programmer for making the drapes not work. “Someone was ‘recently’ in the programming,” they say. Yeah, we were in the programming… six fucking months ago when we installed the new projector in that room. The drapes worked fine, after our programmer fought through the mess the drape people left behind in the programming when THEY were in there last. Oh, by the way, the piece of equipment which has this programming is stuff WE installed several years ago. It is our fucking equipment! Why the fuck are the drape people fucking with our programming? Anyhoo, I told facilities that I was tired of the “he said, she said” bullshit. I wanted BOTH programmers in the room at the same time. “Ok,” says the two faced bitch from facilities, “you schedule your programmer and we’ll get the drape guy out here.” So I schedule our programmer for next week, the earliest time slot available. “No,” says two face bitch, “we have the room scheduled tomorrow at ten o’clock. He has to be here then.” I almost came unglued. I calmed myself and said I'd see what I could do. Fortunately there was a programmer already scheduled to be here for another project today so they took him off of it to look at the Bored Room. Well, he was actually here yesterday so we looked at it then. Yeah, someone, possibly, sent a voltage spike through the serial bus on the control unit because it don’t work no more. Today we pulled the unit to send it in to the manufacturer. I pulled that DVD player from the Viewing Gallery as well. Now my folks are telling me that I am going to have to send the Bored Room control unit in and no one is acknowledging the DVD player. I'm not happy about it. Oh yeah, then there’s this new conference room they are installing. Two face bitch swears she sent the dimensions of the credenza to us, none of our people can locate them anywhere. Guess what, the fucking rack doesn’t fit in the credenza. So the plan is to cut the back out of it so the rack will fit. Problem is, the rack is already wired. The project manager for the installation calls me to ask if I would de-install all of the cables and pull them out of the credenza because he doesn’t have any installers to come out here and do it. I say I will. I'm going to be really pissed when they ask me to hook all the shit back up again. Also, someone screwed up and sent a superfluous $4,000.00 table top touch panel… which got installed even though the drawings didn’t show it was supposed to be there. Mr. Project Manager asked if I could de-install that as well. I did. Now I'm sitting here babysitting the programmer while he tries to finger out why control system won't talk to the projector. Once he has everything working, we can un-wire the rack and go home. Ok, I just asked about it and we have to un-wire then re-wire the rack outside the credenza before we can leave. Yay. Well, I guess I'll crawl back under this table and reattach the table box we had to remove to get that superfluous ouch panel out. I'll talk to y'all tomorrow… if I don’t decide to chew on a pistol later.