Are these isolated incidents or symptomatic of a larger problem?
The elevators in the building in which I work have computer screens that entertain passengers with advertisements, building and office news and an array of information from cbc.ca including news headlines, weather, sports and stock tickers.
Eight months ago one of the computers failed. Ever since, that elevator’s screen has proudly and loudly displayed a DISK BOOT FAILURE message. I alerted the security desk several times in the weeks following the initial appearance of the problem.
Nothing happened.
Nothing has happened.
That boot error persists today.
A few months ago, one of the elevators on the seventh floor stopped dinging and lighting up when it stops to pick up and drop off when going down (it works fine going up). I alerted the security desk about that, too.
Nothing.
Last week, another elevator screen was hit with an error. Microsoft Internet Explorer crashed and displayed the famous “…has encountered a problem and needs to close” pop-up.
Fortunately, that problem was corrected pretty quickly; the same day, I think.
As I consider these individual and slightly humourous incidents, I wonder if these problems are isolated and irrelevant.
Or, are they symptomatic of a larger problem?
At what point should I and the rest of the building population become concerned that elevator maintenance is an afterthought, here?
December 20th, 2007 at 11:10 pm
I would hope that the elevator is running on an embedded system. I don’t think I would want to get on an elevator running Windows: it could give new meaning to the terms “crash” and “blue screen of death”!
December 21st, 2007 at 11:33 pm
Nice one John, and you stole my post…..
We saw something like that at the mall the other day, a kiosk had crashed, there was IP collision. So I was teaching Maddie about how to figure out the IP of the kiosk, and what it meant, and what kind of router they were probably using. She said ‘I don’t want to know this’ I loudly said ‘yes you don’t want them to know you are a kacker’ I love doing stuff like that. I can be such a weenie sometimes…..