AUG Final Friday
Friday, August 30th, 2024 11:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snoozefestaudio |
80F and cloudy this morning.
I ran across another old phone in a back room at work this week and not only took the carbon mike element, but the little contact housing it sits inside.
That'll make it a lot easier to create a proper phone mike for the studio, because I'll be able to hook up a wire to it without having to use the solder iron.
And that's what I think may have gone wrong with the soviet mike, because I had to heat up the contacts on the back forever to get the solder to melt, and often it's that heating that damages something else in the circuit.
I also now have my 1/4" to XLR adapter from Amazon.
So this weekend I'll be testing it all out.
Also purchased a new watch on Amazon... actually it's a refurbished watch, but the same as the one I've been using since 2018... a Samsung Gear S3 Classic.
The Samsung Gear S3 Glassic was a unicorn in the world of smart watches.
It's the only watch I've ever owned that I've been complimented on by people, and several times!.. because it's the only smart watch anybody's ever made that looks like a normal wristwatch!
I've had mine for 7 years, and have loved it, but one of it's two buttons has stopped working.
Day to day, it hasn't been a problem, because that button didn't do much, but sadly, the only way to reboot the watch is to press both buttons together and hold them.
So I can no longer reboot the watch, and... now it's acting all sluggish and glitchy, because it hasn't been rebooted since early 2023.
The refurbished watch purports to be in excellent condition, and cost me $70.00. So hopefully it lasts me another five to seven years.
We had an issue this week with the fire alarm system.
The panel was showing that a device was in, "trouble," which is the lowest of three states of alarm, but that would make it sound a long tone the we had to keep acknowledging to silence... and as the week went on, that device kept going back into alarm faster and faster.
There are several panels around the building, one of which is in the Principal's office, so they were getting really annoyed with it.
Then yesterday we had some GeoStaff electricians on site to troubleshoot the panel for some reason?.. rather than the device in question?... and they were poking and prodding it with different testers... until somebody accidentally shorted out the board!
That turned a normal day into a big crisis where we had all the big wigs from Geostaff and the school board hanging around, with different contractors, until late in the shift, pulling their hair out, trying to get the fire alarm system back online.
It brought down several air handlers, and all the doors in the building closed, because the magnets that hold them open went dead.
IT was a big deal!
They got it partially restored, but I had to think fast to come up with an excuse for why I couldn't stay an extra four hours last night to do fire watch!
Hopefully it gets fixed today, because I don't want to be asked to do fire watch over the three-day weekend, god forbid!
Personally, I think the device in question was probably just hot... because it was very hot, earlier in the week.
And this was an example of how a simple issue turned into a huge crisis because people in suits were getting annoyed, but didn't want to pay for contractors to deal with it.
Mark did ask me if I could do firewatch over the weekend and I turned it down, saying I had plans, because it was a big weekend.
And he was like, "Okay, but... you gotta start steppin' up here sooner or later, you know that right?"
I nodded guiltily, but what I really wanted to say was, If I get a day or two notice, I'm happy to stay late, but if you're gonna let some GeoStaff idiots fuck around with the fire panel right before Labor Day weekend, and they fry it?... No!
At the hospital, if my boss had let in-house idiots touch the fire panel in any way other than to push an acknowledge button... he'd have been fired, they'd have been fired, and any higher ups who leaned on my boss to do it would've been fired.
I... don't really understand why it's allowed at a high school!
I mean... I'd assume they still have to comply with state and federal fire code regulations, right?
I mean... sure, if a device is showing a persistent trouble, your in-house people can investigate that!
What you do is you take the fire system off line... which requires notifying the alarm company... and then once it's off line, they can go to the site of the device and see what the story is.
A lot of times it's an intermittent short in the wiring due to exposed wires where insulation has come off.
But if that's not immediately obvious, you can replace the device with a new one, and if it still shows a trouble, you know it's the wiring, and you look closer.
That building has a mouse problem too!.. because the school district is too cheep to pay for a decent pest control service... and I've been told stories about mice in the ceilings!
The point is... the GeoStaff electricians should NEVER have been trying to troubleshoot the panel itself!
If they couldn't find any reason for the device to show a trouble... that's when they should've called in contractors for the company who installed the panel.
And the fact that the geostaff electricians fried the panel PROVES that point!
They weren't qualified to be touching it!
Okay... it's almost 11PM. I'm calling Brian to chat, so this is it for the entry.
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