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!
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