Welcome To The Machine
I was talking to my lovely girlfriend the other night about work. The reason was because for the first time in months I had to actually do something important and discuss some things with an engineer from IBM. In other words, I had to have my "game" face on.
I was telling her a story about IBM and that most of the people I have met and worked with from the company over the years are complete boffins. They are trained and conditioned to just look at things in a totally different way than normal people. That is how they solve difficult problems.
About 4.5 years ago, I was working for a bank that had just moved to a new location. Working in IT I was able to witness and take part in the logistics behind moving millions of euro of hardware and reconfiguring it in the new building. Needless to say we had quite a few teething problems during the first few months and were frequently visited by engineers from IBM to assist us. I was very friendly with all of them but one in particular, John, spent a lot of time in the bank and we would often discuss the problems that had occurred and their solutions.
One day, we were having difficulty with a machine that we referred to as "the robot". It was a very big piece of kit that was used to store and manage the tapes that were used to back up all of the bank's customer data every night. The robot consisted of several large storage units that contained rows and rows of slots where the tapes were kept. The tapes were about the same size and shape of 8-track cartridges and the robot could hold about 850 of them. It also contained a sliding platform with an "arm" attached that could move up & down, side to side and was used to retrieve tapes from and place them into their proper slots. We would use a console to issue commands, telling the machine what action to perform but the real brains behind it was a laptop computer that the engineers used to ascertain what the problems were and fix them.
On this particular day John was having a difficult time. He was normally very relaxed and methodical while he was working. He took his time to examine things and was very rarely ever wrong with his assessments. However, after spending some time reviewing the message logs & diagnostic tools he couldn't figure out what was wrong with the robot. I approached him to ask how things were going and he just said that he didn't know. He then told me that he was going to go have a cup of tea, sit down and do some thinking.
He returned about 30 minutes later and told me that he had the solution. He then asked if he could have a small sheet of computer paper. I found some for him and followed him into the computer room very curious about what he was going to do.
He explained to me that there were no error messages in the laptop logs but there was something that was preventing the arm from moving properly inside the machine. After giving it some consideration, he realised that the laser, which was mounted on top of the arm, used to scan the tapes and identify their unique ID number was being disrupted. He then remembered that the machine was situated near a window and it was a particularly bright day with a lot of natural light coming through the window. He proceeded to place the sheet of computer paper on top of the robot (which had a glass panel that stretched across the entire top of the machine), rebooted the laptop, issued the start command and the arm started to move!
I was very impressed and asked John how he figured that out. He turned to me with a slight grin on his face and replied in a serious tone, "I just reflected on the situation and thought like the machine would for a while."
I was telling her a story about IBM and that most of the people I have met and worked with from the company over the years are complete boffins. They are trained and conditioned to just look at things in a totally different way than normal people. That is how they solve difficult problems.
About 4.5 years ago, I was working for a bank that had just moved to a new location. Working in IT I was able to witness and take part in the logistics behind moving millions of euro of hardware and reconfiguring it in the new building. Needless to say we had quite a few teething problems during the first few months and were frequently visited by engineers from IBM to assist us. I was very friendly with all of them but one in particular, John, spent a lot of time in the bank and we would often discuss the problems that had occurred and their solutions.
One day, we were having difficulty with a machine that we referred to as "the robot". It was a very big piece of kit that was used to store and manage the tapes that were used to back up all of the bank's customer data every night. The robot consisted of several large storage units that contained rows and rows of slots where the tapes were kept. The tapes were about the same size and shape of 8-track cartridges and the robot could hold about 850 of them. It also contained a sliding platform with an "arm" attached that could move up & down, side to side and was used to retrieve tapes from and place them into their proper slots. We would use a console to issue commands, telling the machine what action to perform but the real brains behind it was a laptop computer that the engineers used to ascertain what the problems were and fix them.
On this particular day John was having a difficult time. He was normally very relaxed and methodical while he was working. He took his time to examine things and was very rarely ever wrong with his assessments. However, after spending some time reviewing the message logs & diagnostic tools he couldn't figure out what was wrong with the robot. I approached him to ask how things were going and he just said that he didn't know. He then told me that he was going to go have a cup of tea, sit down and do some thinking.
He returned about 30 minutes later and told me that he had the solution. He then asked if he could have a small sheet of computer paper. I found some for him and followed him into the computer room very curious about what he was going to do.
He explained to me that there were no error messages in the laptop logs but there was something that was preventing the arm from moving properly inside the machine. After giving it some consideration, he realised that the laser, which was mounted on top of the arm, used to scan the tapes and identify their unique ID number was being disrupted. He then remembered that the machine was situated near a window and it was a particularly bright day with a lot of natural light coming through the window. He proceeded to place the sheet of computer paper on top of the robot (which had a glass panel that stretched across the entire top of the machine), rebooted the laptop, issued the start command and the arm started to move!
I was very impressed and asked John how he figured that out. He turned to me with a slight grin on his face and replied in a serious tone, "I just reflected on the situation and thought like the machine would for a while."
posted by Kub at 09:03
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