Jeff watched the assembly pallet travel into the torque station and stop. He saw the "PALLET HOME" icon on the LCD screen change from red to green and then the message bar displayed "LOWERING DRIVERS". The six electrical torque drivers dropped down onto the six screws of the gearbox and the "DRIVERS DOWN" icon changed to green. The drivers should have started and torqued the screws to secure the cover on the gearbox, but they didn't. He waited the fifteen seconds he'd programmed into the control computer and then saw the message bar display "DRIVER FAULT -- ABORTING CYCLE".
"Dammit", he said under his breath as he looked at the program displayed on his laptop. "There's nothing wrong. Why didn't the damned drivers drive?"
He looked at his watch and breathed "dammit" again, because it was already five-thirty. He should have been on his way home half an hour ago, but here he was, trying to get the damned machine to work like he'd designed it to work. Any other day, he'd have called it quits, packed up his laptop and gone home. Today, he couldn't. The customer was due to arrive at eight the next morning to witness a trial run of the equipment and inspect a sample of the gearboxes produced. If the assembly line didn't work, his company would fail the trial run and that would endanger their chances of getting another contract from that customer.
He turned to Teresa Barnes, the technician assigned to him until the assembly machine was up and running.
"Are you sure you checked all the limit switches?"
"Yes, I am. They're all there and they all work. I checked each one with a meter as well as with your display."
"Well, can you check them again? Something is keeping the drivers from starting and I can't see any problems with the program."
Teresa smiled.
"I'll check 'em again, but they're fine. It has to be your programming."
It's just like Bart says, thought Jeff. Technicians think everything's the engineer's fault because they've never made a mistake in their lives. It would be bad enough if she was a man, but she's a woman and she's not even a pretty woman. Her hair is all jammed up under a ball cap and her clothes are so loose they just hang off her body.
Fifteen minutes later, Teresa climbed the stile over the pallet conveyor from the inside of the assembly line.
"I checked all the limit switches and they operate in manual. I checked all the cables from the limit switches back to the control cabinet. I checked all the wiring from the bulkhead fittings to the input modules. In manual, everything works like it should. Run it in auto once and I'll watch the input modules."
Jeff started the cycle, and when the LCD display said the drivers were down, Teresa yelled, "All the input modules show true, but the output for the drivers didn't come on."
Jeff already knew that because the driver cycle faulted again. He was going over his program again when Teresa walked up beside him.
"Could I look at your program?"
"You think you'll know what you're looking at?"
Teresa grinned.
"Maybe. You're programming in C++, right? I sorta taught myself how to program in C++ with one of those little microcomputers. I can't make it do anything really fancy like this machine, but I can make it turn lights on and off and make a buzzer buzz."
Jeff backed away from his laptop. He didn't think Teresa would find anything, but if he didn't let her try, she'd probably tell all the other techs he was an egotistical ass. They already thought most engineers were asses, but Jeff had a reasonably good reputation with them and he didn't want to screw that up. Without the cooperation of the techs, a project could stretch beyond the allotted timing and cost the company money in overtime.
"Have at it."
Teresa paged down through the lines of code until she found his annotation that said "start drivers". After reading that line of code, she asked him where his I/O subroutines were. Jeff showed her his printed copy and Teresa studied some more, then turned to Jeff and grinned.
"Found it, I think. You're sending a hex number to the module interface to turn on the output modules, aren't you? That's what I do with my little microcomputer to turn things on and off. When I built this control, your prints said to label the input modules as address 0111000 through 0111100 and the output modules as address 110000 through 111110. The output channel to start the drivers is address 111101. That's 3d in hex but your program is sending 3e and that's output 111110. There's an output at 111110 so you won't get an error for setting it, but there's nothing connected to it. Run it again and I'll watch that output."
After the driver cycle aborted again, Teresa backed out of the control cabinet and grinned.
"That's the problem. If you change that 3e to 3d, I'll bet it works."
Jeff made the change, re-compiled, and then started the cycle. He held his breath when the drivers dropped onto the gearbox, and then smiled when the drivers all drove the screws to their required torque. They then retracted like they were supposed to do, and the station released the pallet to the inspection station. That station and the rest had already been verified, so he was done. Jeff turned to Teresa.
"Thanks, Teresa. You saved us from failing tomorrow. I've been over this damn program a thousand times and never saw the mistake. I must have converted the numbers wrong."
Teresa grinned.
"Nah, you just fat-fingered it when you typed it. I've done it before. Well, you get to go home now. I still have to re-route and tie down all the cables I cut loose tonight so they'll be nice and neat tomorrow."
"They'll never look at your cables. They'll only want to see it work."
"Yeah, probably, but I'll know it's not right. Now, get outa here. I'll see you in the morning."
}|{
Jeff grew up on a farm raising corn, soybeans, and cattle, and probably would have followed in his dad's shoes if his dad hadn't insisted he make something better of himself. Jeff had always liked electricity and had played with microprocessors in the computer club at school. When he was a senior in high school, he made the decision to study electrical and computer engineering. His high school advisor said that was a wise choice because there would always be jobs requiring that education.
His freshman class at the University of Illinois was huge with almost three thousand students in electrical engineering alone. Jeff felt lost for a few weeks, but soon got accustomed to the number of people, his new-found freedom, and the responsibility that freedom required. He was a little uncomfortable at first with the number of foreign professors and teaching assistants. Most seemed to be from Asia or India and it was hard for him to understand what they were saying. By studying hard, he overcame the language difficulty and was pleased that he was not only understanding the material, but he liked it as well.
There were only a handful of girls in electrical and computer engineering, and while those girls were intelligent, they weren't exactly prime dating material. Jeff had always liked feminine women, and the girls didn't dress or act much different than the guys. They also didn't seem to want a relationship with a man, or at least they didn't want a relationship with an Illinois farm boy. As a result, Jeff graduated with a BS four years later but with no girlfriend and very little experience with women in general.
Jeff's real love was artificial intelligence and the computer systems and software that entailed. American industry wasn't quite ready for that when he graduated, so he took a job with Rilson Gear, a supplier to the automotive industry that made electrically powered devices such as window winders and seat adjusters. He couldn't design AI systems there, but he could add a little AI for automatic inspection and system adjustments to his software.
Jeff was somewhat of a star at his company because he was good at what he did. His job wasn't the one he'd envisioned when he graduated, but it was interesting work for the most part and it paid the bills. He designed the control systems for new conveyor and assembly systems for new products at Rilson, and helped the techs troubleshoot problems when they got stuck. The word about him from the manufacturing engineers and technicians was that if Jeff couldn't make it run, you might as well scrap it and start over.
As Jeff ate the pizza he bought on his way back to his apartment, he was both happy the assembly station worked and a little aggravated that a tech, a female tech at that, was the reason. Jeff didn't make many mistakes, so the one Teresa had found was a little embarrassing. He'd been looking at his code for hours trying to figure out what was going on, and Teresa had found the mistake in only a few minutes. He shrugged then and chalked it up to the fact that she hadn't written the code and hadn't been staring at it for hours, so the mistake just jumped out at her. It was a pretty simple mistake after all, so Teresa just got lucky.
When the customer visited the next morning, everything went according to plan. He and Teresa stood by as the operators assembled two hundred window winder assemblies without a hitch. The customer quality control engineer took three and inspected them for backlash, proper screw torque and appearance and judged them acceptable. The plant manager was happy and Jeff's boss was happy. After the customer left, his boss came to his desk and shook his hand.
"Jeff, I was a little worried yesterday about three o'clock because the line wasn't running, but you did what you always do and fixed it. We're going to make money on this project, and I'll see to it that you get a share of those profits on your next salary review."
Jeff shook Bart's hand, but then said, "Actually, Teresa fixed it. I made a mistake in the code and she found it."
Bart grinned.
"Well, it's nice of you to give her credit, but we both know where the credit really belongs. Why don't you take the rest of the day off and celebrate a little?"
Jeff did take off that afternoon, but he didn't celebrate. It didn't seem right that he was home taking it easy and still getting paid while Teresa, the one who actually found the problem was still at work. It also didn't seem right that Bart had grinned when he said they both knew where the credit for the success belonged. Bart had been a technician before being promoted to manufacturing engineer and then five years later, to the department manager, and had seemed to forget all about his beginnings. He'd often expressed his lack of respect for technicians.
"They're just wrench-turners", he'd said. "Without an engineer to tell them what to do and how to do it, they'd be lost. The women we're getting now from the junior colleges are worse. They think they should get the same treatment as the men, but they're not as good and they get emotional about things all the time."
Jeff thought it both odd and egotistical that Bart seemed to hold the techs in such low esteem. He thought since Bart had been a technician, he'd know they were a very skilled bunch of people and would want to treat them that way. He couldn't figure his lack of respect for female techs either. They were usually better at wiring because their hands were smaller and they had a better eye for detail. When he thought about it some more, Teresa was probably the best technician in the plant.
By the next week, Jeff had forgotten about the gearbox assembly line and the customer trial. He had bigger problems on his hands. The largest assembly line in the plant, the assembly line with the highest volume requirements, was down hard. There were enough parts in inventory at Rilson and at the customer to last for four, possibly five days. After those were consumed, the entire automotive assembly plant would be shut down unless Rilson could get the line running again.
Jeff was well aware of the penalty for shutting down an automotive assembly plant. The current cost was fifteen hundred dollars billed to the supplier for every minute the automotive assembly plant was shut down. The supplier usually didn't have to come up with the cash. The fee was a debit to the supplier's account. The supplier just had to supply parts at no cost until the total cost of the shutdown was paid. Even a day would put Rilson in serious financial trouble. More than that could mean bankruptcy.
