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Are you a tech hero?

dougw

Hero - a person who combats adversity through feats of ingenuity among other things...

It isn't often we think of technical people as heroes, but they perform qualifying acts all the time. It is easy to think of technology as having little human element. It isn't just about technology making our lives better, it is also people who use technology to help others. This discussion is just about celebrating everyday tech heroes.

I thought it would be interesting to read anecdotes and stories about how you helped someone with your technical knowledge or saved the day with your technical expertise.

It could be simply someone who was stuck on a problem or at a loss of how to proceed or fix something and you made their life easier. Little acts of technical kindness do make a difference and it is fun to spend a little time pondering this aspect of technology...

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  • I would like to call your attention to Dr. Brian Wier a dentist and technology hero who lives in a city near here. At the time of this incident the Dental X-Rays were all film based and each clinic had a processor where an exposed film could be inserted in one end and come out a finished picture on the other end. Most of these machines used a train of gears and rollers to move the films from the developer to the fixer to the wash and finally to the dryer. One day I received a call that Dr. Wier's processor was not working. Unfortunately my schedule did not allow me to get there as quickly as Dr. Weir deemed necessary. When I did make it to the office the machine was functioning so I asked Dr. Wier what he had done to fix it. He told me, "Oh it's not fixed you will have to replace the drive gear on the fixer rack." When I removed the fixer rack I could see that Dr. Wier, using his dental tools and skills had fashioned a functional replacement "TOOTH" on the drive gear. I removed the gear and put on a new one but I kept the gear with the artificial tooth on my desk for many years and Dr. Wier was always one of my inspirations for his ingenuity.

     

    John

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  • I would like to call your attention to Dr. Brian Wier a dentist and technology hero who lives in a city near here. At the time of this incident the Dental X-Rays were all film based and each clinic had a processor where an exposed film could be inserted in one end and come out a finished picture on the other end. Most of these machines used a train of gears and rollers to move the films from the developer to the fixer to the wash and finally to the dryer. One day I received a call that Dr. Wier's processor was not working. Unfortunately my schedule did not allow me to get there as quickly as Dr. Weir deemed necessary. When I did make it to the office the machine was functioning so I asked Dr. Wier what he had done to fix it. He told me, "Oh it's not fixed you will have to replace the drive gear on the fixer rack." When I removed the fixer rack I could see that Dr. Wier, using his dental tools and skills had fashioned a functional replacement "TOOTH" on the drive gear. I removed the gear and put on a new one but I kept the gear with the artificial tooth on my desk for many years and Dr. Wier was always one of my inspirations for his ingenuity.

     

    John

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  • in reply to jw0752

    In 2008 I acquired a customer in Italy to renew his IT infrastructure including the security layer. In the design of his LAN I included a Cisco Pix firewall, a 15K Euro beast. As the customer is the only one Italian provider of funds data for all the other publishers in the world like Reuters, the system should be up and running 24/7. The Pix firewall was delivered on Thursday with the promise from Cisco that the redundant power supply will be delivered 100% the day after, Friday. Then as always happens, nothing has been delivered until the next Monday.

    During the night between Saturday and Sunday, the IT manager called me desperate that the Pix was down, the power supply was crashed. I asked him to open the power supply, check if something was burnt and all seemed ok. The problem was the 2A fuse. Impossible to find at 3 am in the mid of the weekend. The next feed had to start in three hours.

     

    "You are a smoker" I told him.

    "Well, open the fuse caps and remove it (burnt) Cut about 2 square cm of your cigarette packet, with the Aluminium foil. Envelop it around the fuse, replace it and restart the firewall"

    He, very scared of this operation on the brand new 15K hardware, followed my instructions. The trick is that it works as a fuse and if something occurs, the Aluminium foid heats and the paper burn and cut the foil.

     

    This trick worked. The day after arrived the second power supply, the technician installed it and, three months later, the IT manager told me "Hey, do you remember your cigarette fuse? I remembered to replace it just today!" And int was still in perfect condition.