Today Started Off...
I'm not entirely sure how to describe it. Frustrating probably comes the closest.
Late last week, I completed a month with the company I'm working for. I've been told a few times now that I'm doing well, including from the owner, who was told by others. I believe I'm doing an okay job. I think I'm grasping things more, and getting faster. However, I'm still pretty slow, because in part, I'm taking some time to be extra careful.
Or so I thought.
More about that in a moment.
You Ever Waste A Lot Of Time...
Mondays and Fridays, I'm typically starting early so I can get to a particular establishment before they open. I do it, because it's a big place with lots of games sitting on a card system, rather than coin and bill operated. That is a pretty big convenience, because it means, for the most part, that there's fewer things to go wrong.
However, when one or two things that can go wrong do, it can bring a lot if not all of the system down.
So far, that's not happened, but today when I went in, I found two notes saying different things were not working—the cash part of the kiosk that dispenses cards, and one of the rows of prizes. The latter wasn't dispensing correctly.
Okay. I'm not totally familiar with any of the games, but this system is one I know the least about. I've been shown different things to do, and I've been figuring out other things as I go. I managed to get the cash part of the kiosk up and running first. I'd had a similar issue a few weeks ago. It had been a while since it was last collected, and so there were enough bills in the receptor that it literally couldn't accept another one, and one got partially jammed.
I thought that might be it. It wasn't. The bill receiver, where the money goes in, wasn't activating at all. Sometimes that's a buggy sensor, or one that needs to be dusted off, other times it's a power issue, and who knows what's happening the rest of the time. I went ahead and unplugged the power cable to the bill receiver and then plugged it back in. Voila. When I tested it out, it sucked in my bill no problem.
The second problem was a little more tricky. There's a diagnostic which can be ran to test different bins to see if they will dispense correctly. Sure enough, the one row was not dispensing. I tested the others and they worked fine. Then, I noticed that a wire was hanging loose from a motor that turns a wheel that turns another wheel on the bottom of each bin.
I found that to be a little odd. I knew the business had access to the prizes (presumably to fill them up if they were to run out before I got back), but I couldn't figure out why anyone would get in there and pull a wire. So, I went ahead and stuffed the wire back into its rubber sleeve and tried it. Voila, again. It worked. I tried it a few times a couple of different ways and was successful each time.
It got me to wondering, though, what was going on. I saw that the door at the bottom had been fixed. There's a button that can be pushed in or pulled out to cause the bins to rotate or stop. The button had been lying there loose, on purpose, because where it should be attached to doesn't necessarily reach as far as it needs to in order to keep in contact with the door while it's shut. The person before who trained me on that part of the route had it basically set up to manually start and stop, but now someone had put it back.
That led me to believe that someone from the company had been there, instead of someone from the business.
Yep, That's What It Was...
Turns out, there was a service call over the weekend that I didn't know about. I don't know if it got entered into the system or not. I checked periodically since Friday to see if anything within my route was popping up. Nothing.
So, basically, the whole row was not dispensing. Someone from the business had notified the office. Someone was dispatched to look at it. They took out the wire. I guess they had a part that wasn't the right one so they took the wire out and ordered a new part.
Meanwhile, I'm spending time diagnosing and fixing a problem that may or may not actually be fixed because I didn't know that someone had been through there. Funny thing was, the manager of the business said nothing about it, until I mentioned to him later that I had it up and running. He was kind of surprised since the other person told him they would be waiting on a part.
I can't really blame him, though. He thought that I knew. And I absolutely feel I should have known, too, without need of asking him, or calling into my boss to verify that someone had been through. I guess I could have saved myself some time, effort and grief if I had just asked before fixing, but I was trying to be proactive, thinking that things were just out of order as they've been many times already, where I'm the first line of defense.
So, anyway. I guess if there's no record of a service call that I have access to, before I go monkeying with anything , I should a) contact the office to see if they had anything to do with it, before or after b) asking someone at the business who may or may not be available and may or may not know anything about the particular issue. I say before or after since I'm not entirely sure which would be the most advantageous, and figure it could be on a case by case basis that I will somehow be able to figure out with more experience.
The Middle Part Went Okay...
For the most part, the rest of the day went well. While that first stop took over two hours, the other ones were considerably shorter, depending on how many machines and what might need to be fixed. There were two games that were turned off that I can't figure out what for. They both worked fine. No one else seemed to know, either. So, I turned them back on and left them that way.
Another game has been having an issue with one of its two coin slots. I think I managed to isolate it, so maybe we can keep the one slot going as well as the game instead of considering it out of order when it's really not.
A Slight Detour...
I was coming back to drop off the money I collected, when I decided to go to another place not on today's route, but one that was under repair on Friday. A whole back section of the business was subsequently turned off, because electrical work was involved. I know that sometimes machines can have problems getting restarted or whatever, so I thought I should stop in and see if everything was okay.
Good thing I did. There didn't seem to be a problem with power, but something else was strange. The crane on one of the games was stuck in the spot where the plush toys get dropped if a player manages to snag one of them. How it got there, I don't know, but again, there was an out of order sign on the machine. I went ahead and fixed it by turning off the power to the game and turning it back on, then shutting the door to the inside. That pulled the crane back up, but it still had an issue with a wire that resembles an old cable on a telephone, the one that extended from the base to the handset.
All that it needed was to be brought to the other side of the crane, and voila—fixit trifecta. After my earlier experience, though, you would think I would have hesitated to fix it. Again, there was no service call registered, but what if something else was wrong with it, someone knew about it, and wedged the crane down there to keep it from working? The girl I talked to before I left didn't seem to know why it was that way. Hopefully, the crane isn't just shooting down there at will.
Just When I thought It Was Over...
About 40 minutes ago as I write this, I got a text from my boss saying that I had left one of the windows unlocked used for filling product in a crane game at the first business I went to. You know, the one with the puzzling problems. I've been double checking, and sometimes triple checking all locks, making sure I have my keys, my phone, and not leaving any money or product behind. I'm pretty sure I double checked both windows before I left. I guess I should have checked again.
So, while most of the day was fine, the ends aren't all that great. I'm supposed to go and secure the game on my way to the coast tomorrow. I guess I'm okay as far as having a job goes. I was told by my boss that everyone has done something like that at some point. I just hope there's nothing else going on when I get there.
Image source—Pexels