I’ve been in Chester, PA for the past week and I just found out I’ll be spending the next two weeks or more here. I get to come home on weekends so it isn’t intolerable.

Tonight, during dinner, I had reinforced something I learned long ago. People will look to software to solve all the problems. One of our conveyors was having an alignment problem. Product was hanging on a siderail and I received a call about it.

About fifteen years ago I was called out on a pnuematic conveying system that I had put in. The complaint was that product wasn’t reaching its destination. When I arrived at the site I went around all the equipment to find where the problem could be. All I was responsible for with this system was the electrical controls and the software running it. I found a motor that was suppose to be driving a rotary feeder, a sort of airlock used to seperate two different conveying systems, broken off of its mount and hanging by the flex conduit…. still running. The operators should have done the same cursory examination of the system as I did before calling me but they just assumed that it could be fixed by me coming over and hitting some keys.