Bad Day At BlackRock

i want to apologize to the forum for the rants i previously posted, and for the un-professional comments i made. i guess we all have bad days from time to time, and i just experienced one yesterday. please forgive me.
things actually improved today as far as what we got accomplished. the credit goes to the hardworking staff that i'm privileged to be associated with, and the perseverance and tenacity of the electrical technicians i am honored to be teamed with. i even recieved the software i needed to access the omron plc on the big press i mentioned in an earlier post. now i'm in a major learning phase about the omron. there are some differences i see already, between it and the a-b controllers i'm used to, but it does look interesting and the type of challenge i think i will enjoy. i'm sure i'll be posting some questions soon about omron that i hope you omron pros can help me with, or at least steer me in the right direction.
thanks, in advance.

respectfully,
danatech

no problem

Good to hear it's working out.
Remember to act profesional in front of the big wigs but feel free to vent here.
Don't forget to tell the technicians how well you appreciate them,
I am sure with your years you words carry a lot of weight with them,

lotsa luck,

Brian

danatech said:

i want to apologize to the forum for the rants i previously posted, and for the un-professional comments i made. i guess we all have bad days from time to time, and i just experienced one yesterday. please forgive me.

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No apology needed... We've all been there and done that. Besides, we all have to vent somewhere

I am getting worried about some of you boys - One hasn't the faintest clue about latin , and another has BSE - I expect there are a few with Old Timers disease as well.
And as for " I wrote it so cam change it ( but I don't know what made it stop when I modified it )"
I spend my life putting right this sort of code - keep it up , I want to move house .

Its easy to sit back and be condescending but sometimes you have to walk a mile in that persons shoes.

Technician, may have any kind of degree and/or certification BUT usually you are in Maintenance. You get caught between Engineering and Management because both think there "projects" or problems have priority.

Things happen and sometimes you just have to make a machine run. Problems dont have a SIGN saying LOOK HERE I AM THE PROBLEM. Sometimes problems are intermittent and just doing something will make a machine run...temporarily anyway. Its not that easy to state whats specifically is right.

If the world and people were perfect then the wiring/conduit would have been run well in advanced to a specific point....NOTE: you can not always turn conduit to move it 32 inches...just depends. They would never be short staffed.

I recently did some temp work at a company. I spent some time working on a servo system that had burned up several controllers in less than a year. I had to work on a welding robot. I was building and implementing a control system for a chilled water system and pumps for cooling extruded gaskets. I was sitting at my laptop making some additions to the system and getting ready for lunch when someone comes up to me as says "I need you to replace the wax ring on the toilet in the womens restroom up front". I did it.

These days companies want maintenance people to dig ditches, pour concrete, carpentry, painting, plumbing, boilers, generators, machinist, welder, fabricator, HVAC, LOT of Electrical, electronics, AC/DC drives and PLCs. There are probably more that I am not thinking of at this time. Dont forget Janitorial.

If a machine or system is down you are expected to stay on it (thru lunch, breaks etc) until its running again. I got a write up (discilinary notice) once for leaving a system to get a drink. I had been at the plant over 12 hours with no lunch etc...I got a little upset on that one.

In many cases you are expected to work on any and all days they want...ie 7 days a week including many holidays. Shutdowns seem always to be scheduled during 4th of July and/or Christmas/New Year.

On top of that in many plants if you are in maintenance everyone gets paid the same....so the guy that pumps grease with no degrees etc gets paid the same as someone with degrees.

Sometimes you have to "patch" (make a temp repair) to something. Its always been that way and probably always will be that way because of circumstances.

Everyone gets frustrated at times.

As far as programming goes I dont think ANYONE can write perfect code on the first try....there can always be improvements.

Fred Floggle said:

And as for " I wrote it so cam change it ( but I don't know what made it stop when I modified it )"
I spend my life putting right this sort of code - keep it up , I want to move house .

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I don't know how many times I've modified code in the field just to make something work while I figured out what was really wrong. You see were an OEM and we supply the same machine with the same software to everyone, so 9 times out of 10 its not the software... BUT we're in the cotton ginning industry where the gin runs 24/7 for about 6-10 weeks out of the year. If you want some expensive down time try shutting down a cotton gin for even 5 minutes durning those few weeks.

I guess my point is this, I've written a whole lot of code for a whole lot of machines (my PLCLOGIC folder is sitting at 2.8GB) and I know that while I'm very familiar with the code that I'm very likely to break something when changing the code to bypass/fix something else, even temporarily. Don't judge just because code was changed when an card needed to be, after all the machine did work for a whlie, just not long enough for danatech to finish what he was previously in the middle of and get back to it.