An engineering "Miracle Worker"

I remember seeing the movie The Miracle Worker as a child (if you consider being 11 years old a child). I didn't particularly like it but I went because my parents wanted to go and I always went with them. At that age, I couldn't understand how Helen Keller's parents would let her get away with so many things and allow her to become so violent. Also, I didn't understand why Anne Sullivan would stick with such a difficult job. Everyone was mad at her. All the time. But as I look back at it and when I see it on television now with a lifetime of learning about these things, I now consider it one of my favorite movies. How a young woman had the courage and ability to help a younger girl, who was also courageous but blind and deaf, learn to read, write and speak is still beyond my understanding. Well, if they ever do a remake of this movie, my suggestion is to update it with one of the guys in our repair department.

Our company used to sell a line of products that were electronic data logging and control devices. You could write a program (in our own programming language) and store it on the device to have it collect and store data (like temperature, humidity, air pressure or whether a switch was open or closed or whether a light was on or off - and many other things) and store that data with a time tag so you knew when it happened. You could also control things like switches, motors or lights and make decisions about how you wanted them to work. For instance, one popular thing for our customers to do was monitor the temperature of something and then either throw a switch to start a heater or a cooler to bring the temperature back in line. Some scientists even used our boards to run and control experiment on the Space Shuttle, in under-sea pressure cases and in remote locations like Antarctica. The idea is that these places are inhospitable for humans to be there for long so our device would try to make decisions of how the experiment should proceed and record the results of the experiment. As you can imagine, these are very complex devices.

But our company dropped that line of products year ago. But the need for those devices didn't stop and customers continue to try to use them and get us to repair them if possible. So, when a customer called me a few weeks ago about trying to get some of our devices running again, I said I'd look at them to see what I could do. I found that two of the five boards were working and I was able to upgrade them with the latest operating system. But three of them were in bad shape. They couldn't communicate. In a sense they couldn't see, hear or speak. I tried a few things but I couldn't get them to go. I talked with one of the guys in our repair department and he offered to try. Since the boards were old, so was our equipment to test and program the devices. The programs don't run on new versions of Windows and our repair guy had to fire up his old computer - and it wouldn't work, either! So, first he had to get his old computer running. Then he had to remember how to test and work on the old boards. Then he had to patiently work through the board to figure out what was wrong. Finally, he had to find replacement parts for the parts that had failed. Our parts buyers weren't buying new parts for these old, discontinued boards and the components were cataloged or stored in the usual place.

Finally, he was able to get the boards to "speak" and "understand" - kind of like the breakthrough that Anne Sullivan made with Helen Keller when Helen finally made the connection between the things of the physical world and the movements of Anne fingers as she spelled out words into Helen's palm. Our repair engineer's miracle didn't take as long as Anne Sullivan's but it was still a miracle. To me at least.