Whatcha doin?

I'm in DC this week doing some web development work, and living at a nice little TownePlace Suites in Maryland.

What's all the other driving about? Typically one-hour equipment installs, and I'm doing four more this Thursday/Friday and next Monday/Tuesday.

Why don't we find someone else to do them? They're one-time events- one install per market for 211 US television markets, and the back-and-forth has been because of technical issues. Training someone to do these, and then letting them go when they are done, is difficult and possibly cost-prohibitive. It also helps to have someone "in the field" for when things go wrong, and they usually don't, but these last few weeks we've been in a real rush and little things are "missing" here and there.

I've done over 100 of the 150+ installations so far. It's also a complicated system, 30 or so interconnections between 5 devices valued at about $10,000 per install. Because I've done so many, I can usually rip one out in about 28 minutes, as long as everything goes as planned.

Case in point: I recently installed a system in a facility in Mississippi. There was a support pole right in front of the rack (really bad planning on someones part) that made it difficult to get the equipment in, so it took about 40 minutes to get everything in place, screwed down, and connected. When I powered it on, I only got a weird "beep" noise. I needed to take out the 4-U server, which is the second device from the bottom. I couldn't unscrew it and pull it out because of the pole, which is structural and can't be moved. I had to disassemble the entire rig so that I could get the server out and open it up. Reseating the memory seemed to fix it. That install took about an hour and a half.

Now, you probably are thinking "well doh, moron, just hook everything up and test it before you install it!"

The entire system is tested before it ships out, and most of them (98%) work fine on install after shipping. "hook everything up" takes about 20 of the 28 minutes, so adding a 20-minute test to a 28 minute install where everything works 98% of the time is a huge time sink.

Have I bored you to tears yet?