120 the hard way

Pilot fish walks into his small lab at a big computer maker one morning and finds one of the building's maintenance guys packing up his tools.

“I chatted with him for a bit and then asked him what he had been working on,” says fish. “He informed me that he had just finished a work order changing the wall power for our lab printer from 240 volts to 120 volts.

“'That's odd,' I said. 'The printer's been happily plugged into that outlet for years.'”

Maintenance guy leaves, and almost immediately one of fish's coworkers announces that the printer is down and he had just opened a trouble ticket.

Fish opens the printer's cover and looks at the power plate. Sure enough, the printer is built to use 240 volts.

So when the young repair guy arrives to troubleshoot the printer, fish immediately explains his conversation with the maintenance guy.

"This is probably just another screwup where the work order pointed to the wrong wall plug to change,” fish tells the repair guy. “Just verify that's the problem and we'll call facilities and get the screwup fixed.”

Repair guy simply says “OK” with a deer-in-the-headlights look and proceeds to work on the printer.

To fish's astonishment, over the next three days there's a parade of printer repair people through the lab. He sees as many as four repairmen simultaneously huddling over the problem. And he watches as the power supply is replaced multiple times, along with plenty of other parts.

Finally, after days of this, fish hears the familiar sound of paper moving through the printer. He goes over and spots the original printer repair guy working on it.

“As he was filling out his paperwork, I asked him what he found,” fish says.

“'Oh, the power plate was wrong,' he told me. “It said the machine used 240 volts, but 120 volts is coming from the wall.'

“So now it was my turn to simply say 'OK' with that deer-in-the-headlights look.”

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