On Modern Warfare
Or, The Battle Against Faulty Appliances and Customer Disservice
For those who aren't familiar with the saga of the washer (that's most of you, actually), once a few months ago it just stopped working. The buttons on it produced no response at all. The power was good: I verified this by plugging another appliance into the socket. There were no clearly-unplugged wires. It was just dead. I called Sears (the makers of the washer, and the place I'd purchased it two years previous), and they promptly sent out a technician to repair it. He was in my house a day or two later, and I showed him the washer. He opened up the top console and looked around. There were no clearly-disconnected wires or any other blatant problems. He put the console back together having changed nothing, and I briefly demonstrated the problem for him. At least, I intended to, because when I pushed the button to show him that it did nothing, it did something. No one had touched anything beyond a few screws and uninteresting plastic coverings, but here my washer was working, even though I'd verified its malfunctioning only an hour or two previous. Typical. I sent the technician on his way, though he had to charge me a small sum (*cough* $60 *cough*) for the do-nothing house call. The washer worked fine.
Until this past Saturday. Saturday I went in to start up some laundry, and nothing happened. Just like last time, there was no response when I pressed the buttons. It stared blankly at me like a great metal rock. I wiggled wires, and I wiggled the metal body, but it didn't help. I gave it a rest for a few hours in case it should decide to repair itself like it had a few months ago, but even after a few hours of rest it was uninterested in cooperating.
So I did what any proper geek would do and opened it up. I'd seen the technician take the side plastics off the console last time he was over, and I had enough recollection of the motions he'd made that I was able to reproduce them after a little work. The side plastics were off, and the first screws were visible. Like any proper geek I unscrewed them and started pulling and prodding. The next screws were harder: they were hex heads. Fortunately like any proper geek I have a replaceable-head screwdriver with a hex-head of the appropriate size, so it offered little resistance. A few pokes, prods, and screws later, I was left with a pile of plastics to my side and a circuit board in front of me amidst a nest of wires.
And more importantly, a folded piece of paper.
I found out in the first anticlimactic battle of the saga that not many washer servicemen actually service my model washer. You see, my washer contains these interesting gadgets called electronics, and while much of the world has been using this breathtaking technology widely for a few decades now, most washer servicemen have only marginal skill in the field. About as much as I do, it turns out. I can say this with some conviction because that folded piece of paper that lay under the nest of cables turned out to be a Technician's Sheet with fairly clear and easy-to-follow troubleshooting instructions.
First was test the voltage. Like any proper geek I pulled out my digital multimeter and set it to measure AC voltage. I applied the positive and negative leads to the terminals clearly shown in the diagram, and my multimeter faithfully reported that there were in fact about 120VAC across the terminals. That meant the circuit board was powered, so the problem was definitely somewhere in the electronics.
So the instructions gave me clear directions for the control self-test: press a button on the control panel, another button, the first again, and the second again. I did as I was told and got the same thing I'd gotten before when pressing buttons: nothing. The instructions informed me that the problem was almost certainly in the control pad, though a few of the instructions were a little less clear and seemed to hint that the problem may have been the circuit board.
What the instructions did not say explicitly was that the inset on the back of the paper showed some other tests that could be run on the control panel itself. These I found on my own. The tests were in tabular form, listing a button from the front of the control panel and pin numbers for the wide parallel cable used to attach the control panel to the circuit board. There was a notation above them hinting that if the technician were to connect the positive lead of his multimeter to the pin in one column and the negative lead to the pin in the next column, and if he were then to press the control button listed in the third column, then he might observe upon his multimeter a drop in the resistance of the circuit. Or, it directed, if he had a diode test setting on his multimeter, it might report a certain voltage upon the pressing of the button. I unscrewed a few more hex screws and unplugged the nest of cables and began to play.
Now you see, most multimeter leads are much too large to fit into the small holes at the end of most parallel cables. Fortunately, though, I'd recently been playing with small-scale electronics upstairs at my workbench, and I'd had to solve a quite similar problem for that. I happened to have my solution in a parts drawer: I'd taken a set of spare leads with clips on the ends, and I'd clipped each of these clips onto the bared end of a wire, one wire to each clip. With the other end of each wire bared as well, the free end could be inserted into small holes in electronic components, and the wires would act as small and flexible extensions to the leads to which their other ends were clipped. I grabbed these extended leads and began to test.
All of these tabular diode tests on the parallel cable failed, indicating definitively a dead control panel. I called Sears for a replacement, and though the part number listed on the tech sheet was incorrect, the name was right, and with the help of the phone operator I was able to find the right part. I asked her to next-day air the part, as I really prefer wearing *clean* clothes most days, and she happily obliged for a small charge. For some unfathomable reason the total for the part and its shipping was well over $200. I was promised the part Monday.
Monday rolled around, and I returned home from work right on time in the evening to repair my washer. There was no part on my doorstep. There was no note on the door.
I entered my home and promptly called Sears to check on my order. The person I spoke with kindly told me that she saw the order on her screen and that it was listed as overnighted to me. She suggested I talk to UPS to find out why I didn't have my part. She didn't have a tracking number for me, but she suggested that perhaps UPS could look up the delivery by my address or something.
It was worth a shot, I figured, so I called UPS. They could do absolutely nothing for me without a tracking number. They absolutely couldn't give me any contact information for any local delivery offices, as she was quite sure they wouldn't be able to help me. Ignore for the moment that I live in the middle of nowhere (relatively speaking) and that the UPS deliveryman probably had a list of about 10 packages to deliver today. This wasn't important to them; my local office certainly could not help me, so I was certainly not going to talk to them if Customer Service had anything to say about it. They weren't interested in hearing my address or ZIP code, either, because while they must somehow track that information in order to ship me my package, tracking the information doesn't necessarily imply any ability to use that information in a way that might actually help their customers. And talking to my local office couldn't help either, they were quite certain, though they weren't entirely sure where I was.
By now I was hearing all this from a supervisor, because I've worked phone support before, and I know that the peon who answers the phone probably really is powerless to help you if he says he is. Even if he's lying and claiming to be powerless when he isn't, you're just not going to get him to change his story and start owning up to the little authority that his company gives him if he started out claiming to have none. So when dealing with phone peons -- especially in large companies -- it's better to ask politely to speak with a supervisor the moment the first-level peon hints at being unable to help you. In this case, though, even the supervisor wasn't being very helpful. She insisted that they really needed a tracking number or an order number in order to do anything for me, and that if Sears shipped me this package then they ought to have that number. And if they didn't have it for me, then it was my problem to work out with Sears, not bother UPS with it. My dirty clothes didn't make much difference.
Frustrated, I left the UPS supervisor to see if I could go back to Sears and perhaps make some headway finding my tracking number. The Support Rep said she didn't have one, though she hinted that there was a place for one in the database. Many people might not have noticed this subtle point, but I've worked phone support positions before, so I also recognized that hint of surprise and irritation in her voice that signals to those with ears to hear it that one of her coworkers dropped the ball. She could never have said that to me on the phone, of course, but the slight pause and carefully-masked surprise were obvious. You see, database designers don't put a field on the Customer Service Rep's screen for a shipping number unless there's supposed to be a shipping number in there. High-level managers are generally quite paranoid about what actually gets to the rep's screen, because phone monkeys are notoriously unthinking and likely to blurt out absolutely *anything* on their screen to the customer if they think it might quiet the caller's complaints, even if a thinking person would recognize that the thing on the screen is a private note only meant for the eyes of the phone monkeys and their supervisors. So that field wouldn't have even been there if it weren't supposed to provide some useful information. The useful information that it provided to her was that there wasn't a tracking number in the system, despite the fact that there was a notation that the order had been made. This meant one of two things: either a coworker dropped the ball and didn't enter the number when he should have, or else the computer hiccuped (they do this with disturbing regularity) and didn't enter the number when it should have. Either way, it's essentially their fault. The rep quite professionally told me she'd have her Research Team look into it and call me back with the tracking number. The Research Team was unfortunately already out of the office, but she assured me they'd see her request when they came in for the morning, and they could look up my tracking number and give me a call. Regardless, there was certainly no way she could find it if it wasn't in her database, so I was basically SOL. I asked for clarification about when I might receive the call, and she said that it would certainly be sometime before close of business the next day. About 22 hours later. So much for overnighting a part. I politely asked her to reverse the overnight charge since clearly they were unable to get me my package overnight and unable to get me the information I needed to track down my part myself. She gladly agreed. No skin off her teeth; she's just a phone monkey.
Some might think that hate is a strong word, but I really do hate trying to resolve problems with big companies.
So I went to work this morning in the last of my clean socks. I ended up staying late. I got home after 10pm. I wasn't entirely surprised to find that I had no call today at all from the Sears Research Team, but I am happy to report that my part was waiting on my doorstep. I excitedly brought it inside and opened it up.
It was blue. WTF?!
Oh wait, that's just the protective plastic covering. The real metal underneath was white like the rest of my washer. Phew! It was the right part, too. I grabbed my multimeter and my special wire-extended clip leads. I found the tech sheet from inside the washer, which was still open for surgery. I tested this new part and it worked! My multimeter's diode test option reported positive results when I pressed the right button with the wires attached correctly. I went back to the laundry room and spent some time trying to remember where all of the cables and screws went, and after a short time had everything plugged back together and usable, even if it was still wide open. I pressed some buttons, and my washer responded just like it was brand new again. I finished putting all the pretty plastics back in place and screwing it all together, and I victoriously started my laundry, having singlehandedly defeated the dual demons of malfunctioning electronic appliances and marginal customer service.
As I finish writing this, my washer is finishing, and I'm getting tired. I think I'll move my clothes to my hopefully-functional drier (knock on wood) and then go to bed.
Good night, world!
(LJ Spellchecker genius of the evening: amidst -> Mideast)
For those who aren't familiar with the saga of the washer (that's most of you, actually), once a few months ago it just stopped working. The buttons on it produced no response at all. The power was good: I verified this by plugging another appliance into the socket. There were no clearly-unplugged wires. It was just dead. I called Sears (the makers of the washer, and the place I'd purchased it two years previous), and they promptly sent out a technician to repair it. He was in my house a day or two later, and I showed him the washer. He opened up the top console and looked around. There were no clearly-disconnected wires or any other blatant problems. He put the console back together having changed nothing, and I briefly demonstrated the problem for him. At least, I intended to, because when I pushed the button to show him that it did nothing, it did something. No one had touched anything beyond a few screws and uninteresting plastic coverings, but here my washer was working, even though I'd verified its malfunctioning only an hour or two previous. Typical. I sent the technician on his way, though he had to charge me a small sum (*cough* $60 *cough*) for the do-nothing house call. The washer worked fine.
Until this past Saturday. Saturday I went in to start up some laundry, and nothing happened. Just like last time, there was no response when I pressed the buttons. It stared blankly at me like a great metal rock. I wiggled wires, and I wiggled the metal body, but it didn't help. I gave it a rest for a few hours in case it should decide to repair itself like it had a few months ago, but even after a few hours of rest it was uninterested in cooperating.
So I did what any proper geek would do and opened it up. I'd seen the technician take the side plastics off the console last time he was over, and I had enough recollection of the motions he'd made that I was able to reproduce them after a little work. The side plastics were off, and the first screws were visible. Like any proper geek I unscrewed them and started pulling and prodding. The next screws were harder: they were hex heads. Fortunately like any proper geek I have a replaceable-head screwdriver with a hex-head of the appropriate size, so it offered little resistance. A few pokes, prods, and screws later, I was left with a pile of plastics to my side and a circuit board in front of me amidst a nest of wires.
And more importantly, a folded piece of paper.
I found out in the first anticlimactic battle of the saga that not many washer servicemen actually service my model washer. You see, my washer contains these interesting gadgets called electronics, and while much of the world has been using this breathtaking technology widely for a few decades now, most washer servicemen have only marginal skill in the field. About as much as I do, it turns out. I can say this with some conviction because that folded piece of paper that lay under the nest of cables turned out to be a Technician's Sheet with fairly clear and easy-to-follow troubleshooting instructions.
First was test the voltage. Like any proper geek I pulled out my digital multimeter and set it to measure AC voltage. I applied the positive and negative leads to the terminals clearly shown in the diagram, and my multimeter faithfully reported that there were in fact about 120VAC across the terminals. That meant the circuit board was powered, so the problem was definitely somewhere in the electronics.
So the instructions gave me clear directions for the control self-test: press a button on the control panel, another button, the first again, and the second again. I did as I was told and got the same thing I'd gotten before when pressing buttons: nothing. The instructions informed me that the problem was almost certainly in the control pad, though a few of the instructions were a little less clear and seemed to hint that the problem may have been the circuit board.
What the instructions did not say explicitly was that the inset on the back of the paper showed some other tests that could be run on the control panel itself. These I found on my own. The tests were in tabular form, listing a button from the front of the control panel and pin numbers for the wide parallel cable used to attach the control panel to the circuit board. There was a notation above them hinting that if the technician were to connect the positive lead of his multimeter to the pin in one column and the negative lead to the pin in the next column, and if he were then to press the control button listed in the third column, then he might observe upon his multimeter a drop in the resistance of the circuit. Or, it directed, if he had a diode test setting on his multimeter, it might report a certain voltage upon the pressing of the button. I unscrewed a few more hex screws and unplugged the nest of cables and began to play.
Now you see, most multimeter leads are much too large to fit into the small holes at the end of most parallel cables. Fortunately, though, I'd recently been playing with small-scale electronics upstairs at my workbench, and I'd had to solve a quite similar problem for that. I happened to have my solution in a parts drawer: I'd taken a set of spare leads with clips on the ends, and I'd clipped each of these clips onto the bared end of a wire, one wire to each clip. With the other end of each wire bared as well, the free end could be inserted into small holes in electronic components, and the wires would act as small and flexible extensions to the leads to which their other ends were clipped. I grabbed these extended leads and began to test.
All of these tabular diode tests on the parallel cable failed, indicating definitively a dead control panel. I called Sears for a replacement, and though the part number listed on the tech sheet was incorrect, the name was right, and with the help of the phone operator I was able to find the right part. I asked her to next-day air the part, as I really prefer wearing *clean* clothes most days, and she happily obliged for a small charge. For some unfathomable reason the total for the part and its shipping was well over $200. I was promised the part Monday.
Monday rolled around, and I returned home from work right on time in the evening to repair my washer. There was no part on my doorstep. There was no note on the door.
I entered my home and promptly called Sears to check on my order. The person I spoke with kindly told me that she saw the order on her screen and that it was listed as overnighted to me. She suggested I talk to UPS to find out why I didn't have my part. She didn't have a tracking number for me, but she suggested that perhaps UPS could look up the delivery by my address or something.
It was worth a shot, I figured, so I called UPS. They could do absolutely nothing for me without a tracking number. They absolutely couldn't give me any contact information for any local delivery offices, as she was quite sure they wouldn't be able to help me. Ignore for the moment that I live in the middle of nowhere (relatively speaking) and that the UPS deliveryman probably had a list of about 10 packages to deliver today. This wasn't important to them; my local office certainly could not help me, so I was certainly not going to talk to them if Customer Service had anything to say about it. They weren't interested in hearing my address or ZIP code, either, because while they must somehow track that information in order to ship me my package, tracking the information doesn't necessarily imply any ability to use that information in a way that might actually help their customers. And talking to my local office couldn't help either, they were quite certain, though they weren't entirely sure where I was.
By now I was hearing all this from a supervisor, because I've worked phone support before, and I know that the peon who answers the phone probably really is powerless to help you if he says he is. Even if he's lying and claiming to be powerless when he isn't, you're just not going to get him to change his story and start owning up to the little authority that his company gives him if he started out claiming to have none. So when dealing with phone peons -- especially in large companies -- it's better to ask politely to speak with a supervisor the moment the first-level peon hints at being unable to help you. In this case, though, even the supervisor wasn't being very helpful. She insisted that they really needed a tracking number or an order number in order to do anything for me, and that if Sears shipped me this package then they ought to have that number. And if they didn't have it for me, then it was my problem to work out with Sears, not bother UPS with it. My dirty clothes didn't make much difference.
Frustrated, I left the UPS supervisor to see if I could go back to Sears and perhaps make some headway finding my tracking number. The Support Rep said she didn't have one, though she hinted that there was a place for one in the database. Many people might not have noticed this subtle point, but I've worked phone support positions before, so I also recognized that hint of surprise and irritation in her voice that signals to those with ears to hear it that one of her coworkers dropped the ball. She could never have said that to me on the phone, of course, but the slight pause and carefully-masked surprise were obvious. You see, database designers don't put a field on the Customer Service Rep's screen for a shipping number unless there's supposed to be a shipping number in there. High-level managers are generally quite paranoid about what actually gets to the rep's screen, because phone monkeys are notoriously unthinking and likely to blurt out absolutely *anything* on their screen to the customer if they think it might quiet the caller's complaints, even if a thinking person would recognize that the thing on the screen is a private note only meant for the eyes of the phone monkeys and their supervisors. So that field wouldn't have even been there if it weren't supposed to provide some useful information. The useful information that it provided to her was that there wasn't a tracking number in the system, despite the fact that there was a notation that the order had been made. This meant one of two things: either a coworker dropped the ball and didn't enter the number when he should have, or else the computer hiccuped (they do this with disturbing regularity) and didn't enter the number when it should have. Either way, it's essentially their fault. The rep quite professionally told me she'd have her Research Team look into it and call me back with the tracking number. The Research Team was unfortunately already out of the office, but she assured me they'd see her request when they came in for the morning, and they could look up my tracking number and give me a call. Regardless, there was certainly no way she could find it if it wasn't in her database, so I was basically SOL. I asked for clarification about when I might receive the call, and she said that it would certainly be sometime before close of business the next day. About 22 hours later. So much for overnighting a part. I politely asked her to reverse the overnight charge since clearly they were unable to get me my package overnight and unable to get me the information I needed to track down my part myself. She gladly agreed. No skin off her teeth; she's just a phone monkey.
Some might think that hate is a strong word, but I really do hate trying to resolve problems with big companies.
So I went to work this morning in the last of my clean socks. I ended up staying late. I got home after 10pm. I wasn't entirely surprised to find that I had no call today at all from the Sears Research Team, but I am happy to report that my part was waiting on my doorstep. I excitedly brought it inside and opened it up.
It was blue. WTF?!
Oh wait, that's just the protective plastic covering. The real metal underneath was white like the rest of my washer. Phew! It was the right part, too. I grabbed my multimeter and my special wire-extended clip leads. I found the tech sheet from inside the washer, which was still open for surgery. I tested this new part and it worked! My multimeter's diode test option reported positive results when I pressed the right button with the wires attached correctly. I went back to the laundry room and spent some time trying to remember where all of the cables and screws went, and after a short time had everything plugged back together and usable, even if it was still wide open. I pressed some buttons, and my washer responded just like it was brand new again. I finished putting all the pretty plastics back in place and screwing it all together, and I victoriously started my laundry, having singlehandedly defeated the dual demons of malfunctioning electronic appliances and marginal customer service.
As I finish writing this, my washer is finishing, and I'm getting tired. I think I'll move my clothes to my hopefully-functional drier (knock on wood) and then go to bed.
Good night, world!
(LJ Spellchecker genius of the evening: amidst -> Mideast)