chasfm11 wrote:I have a good one. My company provided computer equipment to a large NE telephone company. In fact, I serviced that equipment a their corporate data center. There was over a acre of raised floor across multiple floors.
One of the pieces of equipment was a communications controller. It was specially modified for the phone company to handle a high speed line - which the phone company maintained - between two large cities. We had another controller just like it on the other end.
Periodically, we'd get a call from the phone company's help desk that our communications controller wasn't working because they couldn't transmit with it. The service arrangement was that if they placed a service call and it turned out not to be our problem, we billed them for our time - @ $250 per hour. I always advised them of this when I took the service call. And they always said the same thing - come, your controller is broken.
To test, I had to have one of our guys dispatched to the other end. He and I would then hook up our manual test gear and coordinate our test over the phone company's voice line. We'd start the test and, sure enough, no data was passing on the the phone company maintained line. I then contacted the phone company help desk rep who had called me and he had to get in touch with their service group where an hour or more could pass before we got phone company person who was familiar with this special line. In the mean time, my other city partner and I are sitting there waiting and potentially billing. It could take an hour or two for them to figure out what was wrong. When they corrected the problem with their line, our boxes worked just fine.
We went through this drill up to 20 times each year for the 3 years that I serviced that account. The calls ranged from 3 hours to 8 hours in length, depending on how much time it took the phone company line techs to work on their problem. Never once were either of our boxes broken. Every call was because of the phone company maintained line. So some of the bills (2 of us times $250 per hour times 6 hours) were quite expensive.
I never was able to convince their help desk to call their own line people first and verify operation. Sigh......
And I bet we know each other, because I was the phone company tech, and they always waited until the last minute to call me. I did find a few times where the controller was at fault, but most of those were where they made a mistake and called me first. They always, always, without regard for anything else, based who they would call on the error message and lights on the control panel, and they rarely got it right.
My favorite along those lines was a repeated commercial power failure. Commercial power is the responsibility of the customer not the phone company, but the first time I got sent, nobody knew what had failed and power was on to everything else. I discovered an adjunct breaker panel with one 15A breaker dedicated to the equipment, which was per company requirements, reset the breaker and was declared all sorts of hero by the night supervisor, who happened to be a friend of my wife's. The next time it happened, dispatch called me direct because my name was on the ticket in big red letters - the night supervisor had insisted that I be the one that got sent. Didn't even bother to pick up my truck or tools, just walked in and reset the breaker.
After a couple of iterations of this I rewired a couple of the phones so they would ring direct through rather than through the system with no power, and the next time it happened I just rolled over in bed and called the number I had wired direct and had them go trip the breaker. Despite instructions to the customer to just check the breaker whenever it happened, they persisted in calling the company, which was generating me a minimum four hours pay each time, for rolling over in bed and instructing them on where to find the breaker and reset it.
Finally, with my boss' blessing, I went over and did a little investigation. First of all, I already knew that these calls always came in after 11PM on Tuesday night, every other week, so I asked what occurred on the night in question. They told me that was the night the floors got cleaned. Next I did a little check of the equipment and found that although the company's requirement was that the equipment be on a dedicated circuit with NO outlets, there was an outlet in the circuit at the end of the panel, placed there for ease of use by technicians. I disabled the outlet and the trouble never happened again, and did myself out of an extra four hours pay every two weeks.
On further investigation I found out that the floor cleaners had been trying to plug their buffer into that outlet, and when it didn't work, they went on to the next, but not until they had popped the breaker.
Making my collection, half vast.