Hello, IT? My computer won't turn on...

I got a call this morning from a highly trained operator asking for some help with a docking station. That right there on the left, that is a docking station. These are used by each operator every day to bump test or calibrate their personal gas detectors and the larger five gas meters (known here as "sniffers" which are used to detect different hazards in the field). The docks are pretty easy to use, you snap your little detector in and press "bump" for bumptest, or "calibration" to calibrate.

Easy enough, right?

Surprisingly though, these little docking stations are the current nightmare of my job. I get at least one call a day from operators saying that either the thing isn't working, or they've somehow messed up the settings. One time, I went out to a unit to see what was wrong and discovered that the operators had pushed enough buttons to set whole thing into Portuguese but then couldn't read the Portuguese to set it back into English.

Another time I went out to fix one and found that they had swapped the hoses for the calibration gasses. Where SO2 should have been plugged in, the Isobutylene was plugged in, and vise versa, thus causing the detectors to fail each bump and calibration.

But today, today took the cake. I walked into the unit with my big bag of fix it tools, ready for action. When I looked down at the docking station I saw that it simply wasn't plugged in. I plugged it in and turned it on.

Seeing the dock light up, the operator exclaimed,

"You fixed it! I've been trying to get that thing going for two days now!"