Of old jobs and Vulcan mind-melds
A couple of weeks ago, at lunchtime on a Friday, Steve Short (of Lite-Trol fame) sends me an email wanting to know if we have spare parts for an old LMI dimmer panel. He even included a very fuzzy picture from his cell phone and said the job is the Marriot Glen Pointe.
I wasn't able to find the job in our system right away but in looking at the photo I surmised it must be an ACS rack. This was based only on looking over old drawings years ago as I had never seen one in person. Flash (Bill Florac) confirmed it was an ACS rack and that he had originally done the job turn in 1983!!
I tracked down the job in our system and noted that it was job #00015!! Yes, I ran around the department exclaiming that I had the old job for the week, the month and the year! Not really a formal policy around here, I still think it's fun when one of us gets a job that starts with two or three zeros. Yes, a lot of them are running everyday.
Unfortunately I had to tell Steve that we don't have spare driver cards. He's working with the ballroom on site to figure out how to keep lights on as I offer to bring the card in for a quick repair. We both come up with different solutions that would work and it dawns on me that Lite-Trol can fix this in their shop as long as I can find documentation.
Now most of you know Steve and Lite-Trol but I guess almost none of you know Roger. I've only met him over the phone and he certainly doesn't get out in the field, but when it comes to bench repairing products, there's probably no one to hold a flame to him. Some even says he bonds with the circuits, a kind of Vulcan mind-meld, and intuitively knows just where to poke and prod to bring things back to life.
Turk, Spencer and I wandered over to 3036 Laura Lane - yes, we still have stuff in one of the old buildings - to dig through the flat files of drawings that never got converted to pdfs. There's definitely some cool stuff in the drawers which of course appeal to an old technology geek such as myself. Not far above the ACS drawings I found Bill Smith's sine wave dimmer drawings from 1990. LMI was definitely a technology leader!
There they are! Hand-drawn ACS dimmer card schematics and PCB layouts with lots of erasure marks on them. Lauren was nice enough to take them out to get scanned and printed and the next day Steve and Roger had the electronic copies in their email.
Steve emails me a week later and says that after a couple of LM324s and a cap the card was up and running again. The customer was thrilled and Lite-Trol has saved another system. I roll up the original job drawings and put them away with all the others waiting for the day one of us can once again say, "Old job of the week!"