[Sca-cooks] Entertaining stories for Lainie

[Jeff Gedney]

My favorite one that happend to me is this:

I used to work for a copier/ document processing company that made also made
a unique xerographic wet process microfiche machine... ( it made really tiny
transparent xeroxes of documents no developing lab needed)
Well as you can imagine reliably getting 50 legal pages onto a piece of
cellophane the size of an index card requires an extraordinary amount of
precision.
These machines cost upwards of 120000 1990 dollars, base.
One of these was installed at a major pharmecutical laboratory in Groton
Connecticut that shall go nameless (but begins witha P that sounds like an
F).

I got a service call one day. Priority one, I was to drop tools and get out
to Groton ( I was at the diagonally opposite end of the state, in Salisbury,
actually, and we had a minimum three hour response time service contract )
so I drive like a nut, and get there early in the afternoon.
I notice that the director of the facility was standing next to the machine,
looking kind of sheepish, and all the secretaries and librarians who
normally ise the machine were smiling behind his back.
so I open up the machine, and I smell...
Coffee!
I start cleaning it out as well as I could, but the coffee was triple cream
and triple sugar, and it og tinto everything, and as soon as it evapoated a
little it turned to glue. I cleaned it as well as I could form the High
Voltage (12000 volts carona and xenon flash ) circuits, and then turned my
attention to the film Platen.
well it was an aluminum foam plate (literally!) used by a vacuum so that the
film lays perfectly flat to keep focus), and the platen moved for each image
by special stepping motors... the coffee had clogged the motors and stuck
the overrun switches causing the platen to smasjh into one end repeatedly,
and the fome was completely clogged...
I asked what happened... the director just grumbled, "never mind, whatever
it takes, just fix it." and walked away.

one of the librarians told me what happened. The director was showing off
the facility to some investors, and other muckymucks, and in the process set
down his coffee on the copy holder. Then as he gesticulated proudly he
stepped on the foot switch that activated the copy cover knocking the coffee
into the machine, causing chaos and some star trek (tos) style console
sparks.

The bill was 24,000 dollars, three solid days of work, and parts, none of it
covered by the service contract or warrantee, and paid without comment.


Brandu