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Here is the saga of the Thousand Dollar Postit note. When I came to work this morning I had no idea that I would be spending three hours trying to remove a Postit note. I also didn't expect to put a gash in my forehead. We have a Sun Workstation as the repository for all of our source code and build environments. This workstation is backed up everynight onto 300 GB tape cartridges over a SCSI bus. The pictures below show the tape drive and several views of tape cartridges. You see the bottom of the cartridge in picture 545. When the cartridge is inserted into the tape drive a matching gear rises from beneath the cartridge and mates with the toothed wheel on the bottom of the cartridge. A motor drives this wheel clockwise and counter clockwise to position the tape. When the cartridge is first pushed into the drive it is locked in place and an internal mechanism grabs the end of the tape and feeds it through the head mechanism on spools tape onto an internal spool in the tape drive. Well, to keep track of when the tape was last used there is a Postit that is normall stuck to the case the cartridge is stored in. Unfortunately, this time the Postit happened to be stuck to the bottom of the cartridge and the tape was inserted into the machine before this was realized. Uh oh. You can see this in picture 546. Now the Postit was inbetween the tape drive's toothed drive wheel and the wheel in the cartridge. The tape could be pulled into the tape drive onto the internal spool, but it couldn't be rewound into the cartridge. Pushing the eject button resulted in more tape being pulled into the tape drive and the drive finally stopping with all the front panel lights blinking, indicating a failure. What to do? It took two expensive engineers, one technician, and the Director of Manufacturing three hours to finally get the Postit out of the machine. We had to sacrifice the tape cartridge in the process. Given the hourly rates involved I figure this Postit cost about $1000. The good news is that this did solve the problem! We were able to get the tape drive working again. That was very important because all our intellectual property is backed up to those cartridges. Now, the picture of me was taken a couple days later. Notice the bruising and gouge in my forehead. It just so happens that there was a shelf attached to the wall above the tape drive. It was positioned exactly in the right place so that when I leaned foreward to look into the tape drive that I would hit my forehead on the very sharp corner. I did this three times before it finally drew blood. I just didn't learn! Even after I put a bandaid on the wound I hit it a couple more times. I couldn't slide the tape drive forward because the SCSI cables didn't have any slack. I also didn't want to disconnect anything. |
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SSPX0544.jpg 230.54 KB |
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SSPX0545.jpg 235.42 KB |
SSPX0546.jpg 243.61 KB |
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ZMG_0875.JPG 3.03 MB |