2 weeks Ago By Simon Sharwood
On Call By the time Friday morning rolls around, starting the day with a stimulating beverage feels like a fine idea. And so does delivering a freshly brewed installment of On Call, The Register 's reader-contributed column in which you share tales of tech support triumph and torture. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Ryan" who told us of his days doing field service for Wang Laboratories, in the years when it was famous for desktop calculators.
Yes, desktop calculators. Before calculators became little rectangular slabs, they were big, clunky contraptions that sported a small LED display and an array of keys. The desktop calculator aesthetic was very "supervillain lair.
" Think "My calculating machines have predicted the precise moment of your demise, Mr Bond," and you'll get the idea. If you'd rather not exercise your imagination, there's an online museum of Wang machines that has some lovely pics here . Enough of the history lesson – let's get back to Ryan's story, which saw him summoned to visit a customer whose calculators were misbehaving.
When Ryan arrived, he found the customer's main office building closed for renovations and a pair of trailers in the parking lot. Upon closer inspection, he noticed a long 12 AWG Romex cable snaking across the tarmac and into one trailer. When he entered that structure, he saw lights, electric typewriters, a pair of large coffee urns, and the calculators he'd been sent to fix.
Not all were functioning, and those that powered on performed erratically – or seemed to, as their unusually dim displays flickered just brightly enough to be readable. Ryan started his repair efforts by asking the customer if the coffee was lukewarm or took a long time to brew. "Yes," was the response, followed by, "How did you know?" Ryan then placed the probes of his multimeter into a nearby 115-volt outlet, and showed his client the result of his test – a measly 64 volts.
"The next day, company electricians ran a couple of heavier cables out to the trailers, and all was well," Ryan told On Call. Even the coffee, we hope! What's the most tangential issue you've investigated to solve a tech problem? Have a think then help us to solve the problem of needing some more stories for On Call by clicking here to email On Call so we can consider your yarn on a future Friday. ®.
