The installation from hell

Showing at least rudimentary intelligence, I picked up Jay's PC, monitor and keyboard from his home and took them downtown, where we installed the Coyote card and attached the external 9600-bps modem.

Everything worked fine. I documented the procedures Jay would have to follow to dial in, download the Coyote memory and log on.

That Saturday, I took the equipment back to Jay's house and set it up. Everything went fine until we reached the point in the boot procedure where the mouse drivers were supposed to load.

No good. Jay's trackball pointing device was configured differently than the mouse we had used downtown. (Macintosh users: Please note all the fun you're missing by not having to deal with the IRQ and DMA address conflicts present in Intel-based machines.)

Back downtown I turned the whole mess over to Tech Services which finally found a combination of addresses that let Jay's trackball work and didn't break anything else.

Out to Jay's I went the next weekend and set up the equipment again. Everything worked perfectly. Jay dialed in a few times and practiced working the modem.

The modem was the one tricky part of the installation -- it had to be dialed by software running inside the PC. Once a connection was established, Jay had to click an A-B switch to pass control off to the Coyote card so it could download instructions from the host.

On Monday -- Jay's first day of telecommuting -- I received a phone call from him about the time he was scheduled to log on. When he was activating the A-B switch, his hand had slipped and come into contact with the case. He felt a slight shock and now nothing seemed to be working.

I hauled the equipment downtown again and the techs confirmed that a static electric discharge had fried the motherboard of Jay's '386.

One of our plant electricians later explained to us that Jay, insulated from normal grounding by the rubber tires on his wheelchair, was much like a cloud in the sky -- building up electrical charges until he came in contact with a place for them to discharge.

The fact that Jay favors flannel shirts and has a cloth-covered wrist rest didn't help matters.

The company replaced the motherboard and we decided to switch to an older-style modem -- the kind with phone numbers programmed into it and LED readouts and push-buttons for issuing commands. That required us to reinstall Jay's internal modem so he could continue dialing up his favorite bulletin boards.

You got it: A whole new batch of conflicts appeared, requiring more than a week to resolve.

Finally, a full month after we began to set Jay up, the final conflicts were resolved. His equipment was reinstalled and -- aside from one lingering problem with his tape drive, which requires him to cold boot when he wants to use it -- he's been telecommuting happily ever since.

-- BW

From THE COLE PAPERS, March 1995, Copyright © 1995, All Rights Reserved.