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The risk to technology not enough cats!

It is easy to assume that technology is a magic wand that solves all problems once and for all.   While this is largely true for the Applications on your telephones it is absolutely not the case in complex industrial settings.  

When we built the biodigesters, the vendor was clear: annual maintenance cost was projected to be 5% to 7%.  The vendor even offered a warranty that our maintenance costs would not exceed these levels.  The computer we installed in our tractors, everything has to be removed twice a year to be sent to the manufacturer for repair and maintenance.  

This morning, we got a big, one we had a general failure of our backbone communication system.  The breakdown started a 2:15 AM. We fixed it at 4:41 this afternoon.  Conclusion:  we need more cats on the farm.  Rodents were the cause, they chewed a cheap cable, and the technician took a while to find the fault because he first checked every single device for a fault or short circuit.  On our farm, we have 291 devices attached to the backbone.  

In fact, it was not the technician who found the fault.  He actually called his boss in desperation around 3 pm.  He had checked everything.  At 4:30 the boss came out (it is a Sunday...) and in 11 minutes found the error.  Literally, he plugged the technician's computer into the system, and said "The fault is between 4ZA5 and 4ZA6".   The technician said, boss, I checked the devices.  The boss said: "Did you check the wire for continuity".  A one-minute patch and he was done.  

As he was leaving, I asked what do we need to do?  He said, "Get more cats, It's the first thing I noticed, I didn't see any cats in the shop.  You need more cats to control the rat and mice population".  

This is the moral of the story.  You buy an expensive massive backbone computer system and it is brought down because you don't have enough cats...you just cannot invent such a thing

Note:  I think that's the reason problems with computers became known as bugs because one of the earliest IBM machines was short-circuited because of a roach, hence faults were referred to as bugs...


   

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