SIMPLE PROJECTS THAT GO WAY WRONG - PART TWO

    I post these stories and comments in hopes that it will be able to possibly help a reader who is doing work where they bid or quote a job.  While the last story applied to two-way radio, and this one will be about computers and networking - the basic idea holds true for many types of services.  Pay attention and do not assume - cover your tail by looking for any possible snags - and you will be able to weather them out better when they do happen.

   My second tale of technical woe - has to do with a fairly large computer and network installation I did for a group that was connecting libraries across a broad area in the southwest.  Out here you can sometimes drive for 60 or 70 miles without seeing much. Some towns are pretty small and far apart.  A group was formed to connect the principal libraries in the area with computers. They contacted a number of companies for bids and one of the winners contacted me to be the tech to install the computers. I knew well how much time it would take to setup a new computer out of the box, to configure the network settings so it could use a network and the Internet. I also knew that if you have a group of them going - you can save some time as while one is going through the last part of MS-Windows setup, you could be physically assembling the next - so as to not waste any time just watching a progress bar traverse the screen.  So I estimated the time involved on each and reduced it a bit to allow for that - and then bumped it a bit for "fudge factor" as I like to say - just in case I needed to back up and redo one or two.

  I had not researched the company who brought me into the deal - to see if they knew what they were doing. They had a decent sized staff and apparently did jobs all across the USA. The person I met was quite confident and did not sound like a salesman. He listened well and seemed capable.

  The deals were done, signed and we started in a few weeks when the first of the computers came in. We had over 100 systems in 5 locations inside about a 75 mile area.  Three were public libraries and the other two a junior college and small university.  The closer ones were a mile or two apart and some 50 miles or so from the nearest of the other sites.  Fortunately, I thought at the time, the networking and the connections to each were being handled by the company who interviewed me to do the pc work.

    These folks gave me a list of the IP addresses to use for each location and we began. In the beginning it was fun - lots of boxes, lots of the staff at the libraries asking questions - and most were excited about the new system.  My wife, though not a technician, would help as much of what we did was fairly repetitive.  The little bit of traveling back and forth was also fun - a chance to get out together and have a lunch at one of the local places.

    For the most part, it all went well - we had most of the first 3 locations done and the Internet working well but the individual locations were not "seeing" each other yet.  No worries - the techs from the bigger contractor will be here to tweak things, we were told.  We continued and had most of the last 2 done when we had a revelation.  I went to the location where the tech (a smart young lady) was testing and "tweaking" and was there when she got one part of it to communicate with another.  She was ecstatic!  I thought it was good to see her enjoying her work, but perhaps a bit over the top, so I asked her why this job had proved so much more time consuming?  What was different about it from the rest she had done?

   She answered that this was the first time they had done this type of setup. I got the impression then that a certain lack of planning and guesswork was going on - but was happy we had things under control and going "our" way.  

    Little did I know how wrong I was.  I now needed to go back to each location and change the IP addresses and other network settings on each pc - a simple task but still very time consuming when you have over 100 of them to change scattered about a pretty good sized area.  Several days later we have most of the locations talking to the others but one area which seems to be stubborn. If they fix it one way - they can not contact a certain location - and the other way - a different location becomes unfriendly and wont communicate properly. They try back and forth. They send in new routers, other equipment and finally find they need to use some different numbers on the network all over again.  I am simplifying a bit of the details as its been many years since this and much of the details are not key to the story.

    The key thing here was that I agreed to do a particular amount of work to each system - for a particular amount of expense charged, and did not include anything about having to go back a number of times to revise this due to changes which were out of my control.  I did not mind a little bit of rework on a few systems but going back in some cases 4 times was stretching the spirit of our agreement.

    Some politics was involved in the project - and I look back with a bit of a bad taste about this job - which was something we should have been proud to be a part of.  One particular example of poor planning to me was the one library where we spent several full days and into the evenings installing approximately 2 dozen systems, running cabling, lacing up the cables so that everything looked very nice and professional only to find that they would be taking every pc out in several weeks for remodeling of the building. I found this out after they had been very particular about how nice and neat the systems would be installed.  I asked why they could not have waited till the remodeling was done to install these units?  They said they needed to have an inspection for a federal grant and apparently it depended on seeing these systems in place and running - if even for a few days.

    Again the moral of this story - and my mistake - is obvious. I should have planned for such a contingency and put a clause in the agreement to allow for me to charge extra if such additional rework was required. I should have checked further into the company that was doing the networking and probably insisted on them having all the network up and talking completely before beginning the installation of the groups of computers. You can use this as an example to help you see some of these problems coming. I did go back and get them to agree to some additional labor expenses - but doing so made me look like the bad guy and I feel it could have been done better if I had better checked out the project before starting.

   Check the Internet and often you will find some suggested checklists for certain jobs, some basic boilerplate contract language that can help you in whatever you work on.  And it doe also apply to a standard employee within a company. If you supervisor gives you a project or task - take time to look at  it very carefully if you have not done one like it before - and if you have - you may already know some of the possible "gotchas" that can make your job a real pain instead of something you want to be proud of.

   In computer work - one good resource for such is found at www.techrepublic.com - if you have others and want to share - please do!  Post here as a comment or on OldHackers.com in the forum. Your sharing will help others - Thanks!

SIMPLE PROJECTS THAT GO WAY WRONG - PART ONE

     We all have seen or been part of similar stories - where you start to paint a stripe on your car and end up making it wider and wider to cover mistakes until you end up painting the whole car.  A simple job for a computer that grows till its enough to make you call for reinforcements.  Often these projects could be better kept under control if you could use a bit more planning and research.  Old man Murphy and his law comes into play far too easy some days. Lets take a "simple" two way radio system installation I was involved with about 35 years ago for our first example.

 A base station radio in one spot, and another in a spot a small distance away - and workers who will use some portable radios as they work between the two locations. We then find that the "rub" here is the fact that one of the stations is 1100 feet underground.

  Ok - but all we need is to talk the 1100 feet down the shaft - straight down, all "line of sight" and you could just about holler back and forth if the fans and machinery were not making too much noise. The portable radios just need to work inside the shaft area - again simple easy line of site for radio. Now my boss knew that rock either absorbed the radio signals or bounced it excessively - he was not (if i remember correctly) sure which it was.   So we make it simple - by putting the topside antenna down nearly 50 feet into the shaft, and the bottom side antenna up inside the shaft about 50 feet,  the two locations will be only 1000 feet apart. To be extra sure we have lots of signal to blast down this 1000 foot shaft - we put some yagi antennas at each end - with probably 9db gain - making the signal level in that shaft really strong. We even put the yagi antennas in some fiberglass shells to protect them from the potash salts that accumulated everywhere. Did it work?

   No.  We checked everything top and bottom and just could not believe that it would not communicate.  We took a high powered portable radio (lunchbox type) and started down the shaft - slowly and checking with the topside base station every 50 feet or so.  At about 400 feet - we lost contact with the top side - and about 400 feet from the bottom we could talk to the bottom station.

    Please keep in mind that the gentleman who bid and ordered this system, my boss in this job some 35 years ago, was no dummy. He had seen and worked with 2-way radio for many years and put in many antenna systems for many different types of systems.  But he had apparently just decided to go at this with lots of signal and hope for the best.  It may be that the signal level caused part of the problem - I have never researched it fully myself.

  Did we mention that this location was an hours drive away - and we did many trips back and forth to try this or that and to be 100% sure that we had done what we could. We were also slowing down some of the regular crew at the mine - as they had to suspend some of the loading work while we were in the shaft. We had to have "babysitters" to be with us for safety sake - even after taking a half day course on mine safety.  One of the funnier moments was when I walked near a hole in the floor - it had to be smaller than 10 inches square, and had a pipe fence around it to be safe and keep anyone from twisting an ankle in it.  The "sitter" grabbed me and pulled me away - worried that I might fall in (somehow) this small hole.  I tried to explain to him how I routinely worked on radio gear mounted in boxes 1500 feet up on a 1830 foot tv tower. Working there where only a few places were safe to stand - and they were just inches wide. Everywhere else, was a long way down. His concern was a bit much to me at the time.

      So its important to research and not assume - to look ahead and if you have not done a job like one before - you should check it out fully before you do it - or even quote such work.  And - the more sizeable the job, the more this can apply.  I will explain how that worked on a larger network job in one of my next blogs on this subject.

    The mine shaft ?   Well in digging a bit more my boss found that there was a certain type of coaxial cable that had a slot cut in the shield under the plastic jacket purposefully to allow some signal to leak out all along the length of the cable.  So we went back with a 1000 foot roll of this cable - seems it was about an inch and a half or 2 inches in diameter - so this was a huge spool of cable. We hooked it up where the topside antenna was previously, and using a gun that shot nails into the rock, we unrolled the cable and nailed it in every 3 feet all the way down.  This was in winter and the air and moisture coming down the shaft made for a chill factor that is well below freezing.  We had part of the shaft crew with axes chopping the ice out of the corners of the shaft as we put the cable in place.

   Part of the way down we had a problem.  The shaft crew was using a pull cable in the shaft to ring a bell upstairs.  They have a very complicated series of long and short rings to indicate to the lift operator what they want to do - including going slowly and stopping every 10 feet.  However the ice problem we were fighting froze up the cable up above us somewhere - and standing orders for the lift operator would be to pull us up out after so many minutes without any contact.  If we did that we would have to cut the expensive cable and come back another day with more.

  Fortunately that time, we did plan ahead - and had brought one of the portable radios along to test with - and were able to shout on it enough to get someone to tell the lift operator how to proceed and we could finish the job.

   The next time I post about such jobs - we will look at a rather large network and computer setup I helped with and how a simple oversight caused lots of headaches and extra labor. Meantime - think it out, think of what could go wrong - plan ahead and if possible have a plan B waiting if you can.