Something and nothing!

Join Date
May 2010
Location
London
Posts
689
'Something and nothing' is a common term used in the UK for describing a trivial matter.
It is also used A LOT for an electrical problem.

I only bring it to light as it has been said twice to me this week.

ie: 'Ron, the main motor keeps tripping - we have reset it 10 times already. Can you come and have a look. It's probably something and nothing.

And today; Can you come Monday, the middle two rollers keep over speeding - it will be something and nothing.

How do they know? What do they really mean?

Best guess. We have tried everything we know and the fault is still there - but with your excellent skills you will have it running again very quickly. But we are not going to say 'your excellent skills' and we are not going to say 'we are clueless or lazy' In fact, when you do get it going again - we are going to take as much credit as we can from upper management.

What euphemisms for 'I can't fix it' do you hear? :rolleyes:
 
I can't fix it here comes in many forms. It is also known as I don't understand how it works.

Usually the machine is a piece of you know what, or there is obviously something that changed in the program logic. (Because that happens all the time ;>)

Funny part is, 9 times out of 10 I walk up to the machine and there is an obvious problem like a proxy with the face rolled over itself so the input is always on, or a belt laying on the floor, etc.
 
I usually hear " It's something in the program", when in fact, there is a gear box lying on the floor or something like that.
 
Its something in the electronics!
The program must have changed!
It's been like this for a long time!
The sound (noise) went away last week. Now the machine is not working!
I think we let the smoke out!
I use to do this when it didn't work. Now this does not work!
I use to hit it here and it would work again. Now it does not do anything!
...
 
Like Jim G., the most common thing I hear from our maintenance folks is "Can you check the program? I think something's wrong there."

Second most common is "Hey, I'm really busy right now, would you mind looking at this for me?" Then when I walk out to the machine, I pass them heading to the break room or standing around talking.
 
"I'm sure it's something simple, but....." and they never seem to tell me what the but is.
 
Being on nights we got to double as the engineering staff most of the time as well.
So I often hear:

1)"Must be a glitch in the program."
Translation... "I don't know how to run this equipment." I can count on one hand the number of times the real issue was programming on any machine that has been running for more than 6 months.

2) "I think an eye must be bad"
Just don't ask which eye they think might be bad. You only confuse then with such an in-depth question.

2b) "The sensor is bad, it says we aren't getting any flow."
Nine times out of ten, the correct valves are not open. For some strange reason, dead heading the pump to a closed valve dramatically reduces the flow.

3) "I'm not sure what's wrong, but I'm pretty sure it's electrical"
Of course it is... If there is a light or an outlet near by, the problem must be electrical.


The flip side...
Excuses I have used:

1) "I'm not an operator, nor have I played one on TV. Call your supervisor."

2) "Sorry, we asked for training on this new equipment, but we got none. And none is about as much help as I can be on this."

3) *My personal favorite* "Day shift effed it up, day shift can fix it up. I have their numbers if you'd like to call them" :)



Wubba.
 
I think my favourite two would have to be:

"The PLC seems to be forgetting..."

and

"The PLC seems to be confused."

It takes a lot of restraint sometimes to hold back from telling them that there is definitely something that's confused, but the PLC is not it.
 
I have one client who keeps complaining that the PLC at one of their plants "sometimes gets stuck in a loop". I tried to explain that if it wasn't in a loop then his plant would only work for about 20ms. I gave them a price to rewrite the logic (very poorly done, by someone with a compsci background) and fully recommission their plant... but it seems they really would prefer to just complain about loopy PLCs at every weekly meeting.
 

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