Enigma
I
left my tool case in the trunk of my car and walked into the Eastern
Airlines headquarters building in Miami wondering if I might run into
my brother who managed the Interline Billing department, located in
the same building. I just finished a service call in nearby Hialeah
and called Bob Traum to find out if he could meet me for lunch. Bob
was signed out to nearby EAL, not
far from one of our favorite
barbecue places. He was working on the one machine that bedeviled the
Miami IBM service office for years, a forty-year old bank proof
machine known as an 803. Bob was far from finished with his service
calls so I thought I’d drop by and, since I wasn’t trained on the
banking machines, see if I could lend moral support.
There
are famous machines, or more correctly, infamous machines in IBM.
This particular bank proof machine was one of the infamous ones. It
defiantly blew fuses whenever it damned well felt like it. It didn’t
care who the operator was, or who tried to solve its mysterious
idiosyncrasies. It failed intermittently no matter how much time or
money IBM threw at it. It had been whimsically powering down without
warning for years despite the effort of the talented specialists who
practically rebuilt the machine from the frame up. Eastern had long
relegated the machine to backup service as they couldn’t rely on it
for uninterrupted service.
This
particular machine, built in 1949, performed a unique service that
newer, more modern check processors simply couldn’t. It processed
checks and tickets that were mutilated or damaged simply because the
document was only moved a few inches to the receiving pigeon hole as
the receiving pocket, mounted on a huge, rotating drum, was moved to
meet the check, as opposed to the newer machines which used belts and
pneumatics to zip checks around the machine to find the appropriate
receiving slot. This 803 was appropriately assigned to the slow speed
section of the accounting department.
Bob
graciously introduced me to Patricia, the section manager, then asked
me if I had ever seen the famous machine that defied analysis.
“No,
I’ve never seen it,” I answered, “Is it in use?
“Yes,
but no problem,” said Pat, “I’ll ask the operator to move to a
different machine.”
I
walked behind her as she approached the operator who was busy running
the 10-key calculator style keyboard. Patricia leaned over and talked
to the 803 operator, who nodded, then started clearing the machine.
As she slid open the door over the huge drum pockets on the side of
the machine, a flash caught my eye from inside of the machine. I saw
the flash through the partially open door. The big machine went dead.
“Oh
look! It just failed! That’s funny it would do it when you’re
here.”
Bob
looked at me and said, “I don’t believe it. That’s the bug!”
“Hand
me a screwdriver,” I told Bob, “I know what the problem is.”
Bob
gave the that famous, “Oh, brother, here you go again.!” look,
but he handed me a screw driver and we proceeded to take the side
panel off the 803, then we rerouted the power leads to the panel access
light switch which was shorting to a metal flange on the door cover,
only if the operator pushed just hard enough to flex the door
against old, worn wire insulation on the switch terminals.
Bob
just looked me and laughed as we re-wrapped the wires with new
electrical tape. We moved the wires so they would never touch
anything, much less the panel cover, and told the operator to let us
know if it ever happened again.
She
gave us that “Yeah, sure!” look and once again powered up the
machine.
Bob
said to me later as we ate our barbecue sandwiches, “Are you lucky,
or what?”
“Timing
is everything!” I answered. “But I’ll take luck, too! It
certainly doesn’t hurt my reputation!”
The
803 never powered down unexpectedly again, and I still disavow any
knowledge of banking machines.
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