What pissed me
off no end was the customer (Naval Air Propulsion,
Trenton) who called me to ask me to change U41 on the TE16 logic and
write board because his tape drive wouldn't go on line.
Why? Seems like a pefectly logical thing to ask for. You'd have hated me
when I _insisted_ that DEC supply me with some overvoltage protection
diodes for one of their monitors (damaged IIRC by a mains surge). No, I
wasn't going to pay for new monitors, or even new PSU boards. They could
supply the part that I was darn well asking for. Fortunately, the system
manager of the VAXcluster where this happened backed me all the way...
-tony
Well, can you imagine the paperwork I'd have to do to special order the
IC's (and he was a 16x5 DECservice site and management would be
wondering about call open time, escallation, outages) and since I had
the board in my hand in less than two minutes and had it to his site
and installed in under half an hour it's a bit unfair to demand chip swap
over board swap on this occasion so he could get his jollies...
The cost to him for the board over chips was ZERO since the Federal
Government paid for full service on the site.
As far as supplying parts insted of you paying for monitors...
I think they should've been supplied. And I don't think DEC wold have a
problem with that. I've done chip and component level work rarely
and I'm probably not in your league, but I fix vt100 video boards with a
cap and a diode from Radio Shack... total cost $2.00 or less.
However, I wasn't going to have to have an open call on my log for three
weeks while I waited for parts just because an engineer wanted to bust
my er-chips.
Bill
---
bpechter@shell.monmouth.com|pechter@pechter.dyndns.org
Three things never anger: First, the one who runs your DEC,
The one who does Field Service and the one who signs your check.
