Customers

Thought you all would like to file this it the archives as another one,,,,,,,, I'm sure its happened before but it goes like this

Thursday - Customer rings agent, savages him for our "New" equipment being down, " Get it fixed Now or else !!!!!!!"

Agent phones me in panic, he's to drive 2 x hours top get there whats wrong with the machine ???? don't know call me when you get there.....

Fuse blowing ! , dammit its a short somewhere, i'll send the circuit diagrams,,,,

Agent abused again for machine being down........ bonkhead

Agent phs,,,,,,Hes found the problem,,,,,,,, the customer wanted a name plate put on the machine,,,,,,,so ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,he drilled through a piece of steel at the front of the machine, that happens to contain all the control equipment.. one multicore dead !

THe customer is always right

Hehehe

This week:

Customer phones; Someone sabotaged our machine, disconnected wires from contactors and removed some parts - machine will not run - there was a big bang when we turned on. (VERY VERY URGENT)

They show me the 'star' contactor and timer disconnected and removed from a star-delta setup in panel.

Big enquiry; who did it?? (witch hunt then proceeds)

Replace with new - test motor leads - no circuit!

Someone then remembers the motor was removed a year ago and someone borrowed the contactors for another machine.

Find original and real fault - reverse contactor stuck in - replace.

1 day of production lost and some ****-eyed glances at me. I should have known that the star delta setup was not still used.

Another one

2 A.M. phone call: "Something's wrong with the SCADA system, can't change any of the setpoints. The process is down, how soon can you be here?"

Get out of bed, make coffee, drive one hour to site.
Check out system, problem found!
Number lock on keyboard was off!!!!!
Now I will always ask the question: Is the number lock on?
Before I leave home.


Ken

11pm phone call blending plant won't run scarda ok but plc dead.

1st question have you checked all the breakers in the main panel.

answer yes....

2nd question are you sure even the ones in the left hand side of the panel you know the hard to spot ones..

Answer YES

3rd question are you really really sure??????

Answer YES YES YES now get in here and fix it and stop asking dumb questions..

11:30pm arrive at work 11:45pm having got changed twice and picked up my gear open panel reset breaker (one of the ones on the left hand side that are hard to spot ) and went home......

Ever had the feeling no one listens

On Tuesday morning the customer called. The drive for the X axis of their three-axis gantry router is down. No error codes or other outward indicators, it just doesn't move. My problem is, I'm just starting day one of a three-day training session and I'm the trainer. I can't get there until Friday. Have they checked all the obvious things like power, breakers, mechanical things? The customer assures me they've checked for the obvious things.

I tell him that if he can get somebody to stay overtime, after my class is over I'll drive the two hours and be there by 7 PM. It's the best I can do. He agrees.

7 PM. I arrive at the plant. As we're walking to the machine, I remember that I don't have my tools with me and suggest that my contact get a meter and a few simple hand tools. He leaves to get them and I continue on to the machine. When I arrive at the machine, sure enough, the power is on and when I try to jog the X axis, there is no motion and no fault codes on the display. I walk around to the motor and lying on the floor under the drive guard is a broken timing belt. When my contact arrives with his toolbox I'm holding the broken belt and saying "I think I may have found the problem".

Sunday evening get a phone call the Pinnacle conveyer system won't run. Drive in to work being nice and local. Find that they had moved 5 conveyer sections. E stops not reconnected. 120 volt control voltages not completely terterminated. Juggle juggle figure out which conveyer moved where. rewire entire panel. rewrite program. Bypass estops so that we can redo from scratch. move 12 photoeyes. not bad at 11 pm Sunday night for a piece of equipment that must run Monday morning. at 6 am

11:00 PM on a Sunday, cell phone rings. One of the local plants say that the data collection SCADA program isn't working, you need to get down here!

I ask them if they have checked the basic stuff, cable connections, rebooting computer, etc. and they say "of course we have, now you need to get down here and fix your POS program RIGHT F'IN NOW!"

So, I have to explain to the wife that she's not gonna get lucky bawling and head out to the plant. When I arrive, I am greeted by every nasty name in the book because I am causing production to go down.

I walk over to the machine and open the cabinet - the problem becomes pretty obvious (to me anyway). So, I call their crack maintenance supervisor away from his solitaire and ask him if he was sure that they had checked all of the basic stuff before I arrived. He yelled at me some more and so I asked him "where's the computer that used to be in this cabinet?" moon2

Apparently, one of the line workers that was laid off the week before decided to take a severance package with him.

So, I ask them where the spare computer that we had supplied was. He said he didn’t know, but his solitaire PC looked awfully familiar! I hooked it up (and removed the games) and was out of there in half an hour.

Somehow, I still got the impression that they thought it was my fault!

who Should pay?

hi all
this thread have driven me to a very important question?
when your customer call you for help,you drive at least on hour,you carry on your tools ,and may be you have an assistant.you stop working in another project
then you go to him to find a lose wire,disconnected cable,broken belt or any other problems which you are not responsible for?
Should he pay your daily rate or you do it as a favour?

Re: who Should pay?

hesham said:

Should he pay your daily rate or you do it as a favour?

Click to expand...

That all depends on how good a customer they are... If they've purchased lots of equipment, and will probably purchase lots more, and usually don't do stuff like that then its free... If they're a pain in the a$$ customer who I would have prefered in retrospect to never have even quoted they get charged for everything I can think of... Its just a judgement call.

My policy is that unscheduled service calls like these will be a four hour minimum. Generally, customers that call for problems like these have plenty of other issues. I usually ask whoever called me in if there is anything else he'd like me to look at while I'm on site, explaining that since he's already bought four hours of my time, he might as well get his money's worth.

Our situation is a little unique.

I work for Lear's tooling operations and we make equipment for Lear Tier 1 plants only. So, even though we are supposed to charge for every service call, it usually ends up with the Plant's corner office calling corporate headquarters, who then calls our corner office and that's the end of it.

Customer called, says he can't establish comms with his MicoLogix 1200 via his laptop. Go thru the obvious stuff with verifying he had the right cable, checking comm driver setup, deleting driver and starting from scratch, etc., etc. After about an hour and a half on the phone with this guy, I hear someone in the plant walk up and ask him, "Are you trying to talk to this PLC?" My customer replies in the affirmative and the guy says, Well, I don't know anything about PLC's, but when our maint. guys do this, they usually plug the other end of that cable into the PLC." I then vowed to never get mad at another tech-support guy "insulting" me by asking the obvious "dumb" questions.

I'm in Portland on a modification and my best friend is there visiting. I'm planning on meeting him to show him some sites (Mission Theater) after the job is done. Most of the day is hardware installation, I help with that and then modify the code to work with the new hardware. After the robots and everything check out OK I leave just in time to catch the movie while the other guys button up the machine. At the theater I get paged, the robots quit working. banghead They were kind enough to work on other stuff until the movie was done and I show up immediately after to find that they jammed the robot pendant control against the robot reset button while buttoning up the machine!

It's pretty sad to hear all these terrible experience. You guys have to drive for hours to reach your destination. Singapore is very very small..so it very very easy to travel around for all servicing, no matter how small. Customers are always right, ya?
This has yet happen to me before, but I'll related my colleague's story. My company does a lot of overseas projects. So there was this one from a pretty remote place in Vietnam. They called the company one early morning and told us to send an engineer to the site, as the diesel generator kept stopping after initial cranking, and the under frequency error always appears. So my colleague asked if they had turn on a seperate supply that also go into the panel, and the load sharing module is connected to that supply. the answer was yes. All other standard troubleshoot were answered right. So the company sent my colleague on the first flight there and he reached the place by late afternoon, took a bus to a district station and changed to another bus, and later changed to a car. Arrived the plant at about 2-3am, just to wire a loose connection. It was the wire connection from the supply to the LSM, came loose. My colleague was so angry over there! and the company paid more than 700 bucks just to fix a loose connection. So when another problem happen there, the boss say "Relax! We'll go by the cheapest way possible..By train."
That's just it.

regards
Sherine T.

If I Thought long and hard I could probably top all of your stories because my employer has the best idiots that money can buy!