Normally Lou Corlin did his troubleshooting in the room right behind IT’s hardware help desk. He wasn’t an actual bench tech, although he wouldn’t be surprised if he’d get tabbed to train for it. But today he’d gotten nabbed and brought down to work on some equipment deeper in the IT department, where only authorized people were supposed to be going.
At least he was working directly under one of the senior repair techs, which meant getting told stuff like “hold this wire” or “hand me the #0.0 Torx screwdriver.” Stuff that was well within his present capabilities, even if he’d rather be doing any of several other tasks up front.
But he’d been the one called down here, probably because they knew a Chaffee wouldn’t argue or give them any static. He recalled Juss Forsythe telling him about being given the task of sorting out an entire tool kit that had been returned from an EVA dumped into three buckets coated in moondust. Juss was pretty sure Ken had given him that task for pretty much the same reason: he was an agreeable sort of guy who would do the job and do it right.
They were just winding up whatever they were supposed to be accomplishing and closing the machine back up for tests when Steffi Roderick walked in. “Looks like you’re coming right along there. At least we’re not trying to repair a forty-year-old line printer that’s been out of production so long you can’t even find spares.”
Before he could even consider whether he might be speaking out of turn, Lou said, “That sounds like an interesting one.”
“Oh yes, it was interesting all right, in the sense of the proverbial curse.” Steffi’s mouth quirked into a wry grin. “I was a junior by that time, and I was working in the computer rooms. We all wondered why Purdue was still running that thing, considering this was well before eBay, so you couldn’t just do a quick search and find a used part someone halfway across the country was selling. But that thing was still printing up jobs for several of the mainframes, which was where a lot of the science and engineering stuff was being done. And that meant we’d have some senior professors seriously unhappy with us when they’d come in and discover their printouts weren’t available because the line printer was down again.
“I can imagine. I’ve had to deal with people from the science departments here when their equipment was down. Some of them can be really, really cranky, especially when you tell them it’s going to take a few days and they’re trying to beat a deadline on paper submissions for a big conference.”
“Oh, yeah. If anything, it was even worse, because they sort of understood when their equipment wasn’t working properly, but they expected the university’s stuff to just work. The last year I was working there, we were getting pretty creative working out solutions to hold it together and coax a little more work out of it. A couple years later, someone told me that they got rid of it right after I graduated.”
“Figures. Just figures.”