Technical Support Truths

Over the last 35 years in electronics, you'd think I'd have seen just about every conceivable failure and solution. But NO, I'm still seeing new things and learning new solutions to ever newer problems. I could fill volumes of books on what I've seen but I have neither the time nor space to begin collecting these many reams that make my experiences. In my own home, when I build a new system, I have to set aside at least a week of loading, wiping and loading again all the software programs that I wish to use. The hardware has never presented a problem, it usually only takes me a couple hours to assemble a system and get the OS loaded. That's where the fun begins. Getting all the programs to play nice together is the hard part. Once I get it all going, I back it up before even going on line. When I add new programs, it becomes a real task to go back and check that each program is still working properly. Roughly thirty percent of the service calls I make are for straightening out these types of problems. Most users cannot give an adequate discription of their problems, they just know it doesn't do what it used to after they loaded some program, or downloaded and installed some game or program. These interactions will drive anyone crazy and searching through a dozen or so applications and scrutinizing drivers will give anyone monstrous headaches and cause hair loss. Rarely does a hardware fault leave me stumpted but I do have a tight knit group that communicates daily and sometimes a fresh look will provide new insights to otherwise obscure approaches. Over the years I have serviced equipment ranging from high voltage circuit breakers and their metering and protection circuits to low voltage lighting and everything inbetween. More and more equipment these days is processor controlled and a lot of faults manifest themselves in the users minds and not in the equipment itself. Getting some systems to do things it can't or wasn't meant to do seems to be the operators motto and results in high numbers of trouble calls that really have no resolution except in instructing the user in the proper use of their systems. Servicing equipment in strange environments are the most taxing and often the real cause of many failures. Whether on Alaska's North Slope in fifty degree below zero weather, off-shore drilling rigs, fifty miles from land or on top of a three hundred foot radio tower, it wouldn't be a challenge if it was just my neighbors home, but even then it can present some very unique situations. The mind is a very large storehouse of information and catagorized in such a way that no manual or cheater card can find resolutions any quicker. I have been accused of using a magic wand and even pixie dust but it still comes down to experience and logical approaches to the presentation of non-logical events.

"I don't know what's wrong with this thing but your application doesn't work. I can't type anything in any field. And it's infected my entire machine. The cursor just keeps moving across every word document I create. You need to come down here now and fix it!"
(drove 30 minutes to get to client site)
walk in
go to his office
take his clip board off the space key