STORY DATE - November 2013 / LOCATION - Dollard-des-Ormaux, Québec

Had to shuffle my schedual at the last minute after work today and ended up doing a service call in the west island instead of tomorrow night. It always amazes me how accommodating  clients can be when I suddenly have a slot open up for home service. People want to play pinball again.

A fella named Rick had called me a while back for an appointment.  A very hip and sharp self made man, who lives alone in a modest super clean orderly house in the burbs. The place is pure, simple, modern and uncluttered, he must have seen his share of crap I thought. Indeed, because for a living Rick runs a large storage locker facility. Good business - real estate combined with people's need to own too much stuff and wanting to hang on to it for some reason or another. Even after purchasing these things, it keeps costing people money long after. What a gold mine, it costs money just to keep stuff even when you hardly ever use it. It is almost like interest on a credit card, you keep paying for stuff after you bought it, even after using it up and throwing it out in some cases you may still be paying for it somehow. Brilliant. Add to this the fact that people are being squeezed financially left and right and some of Rick's lockers just end up coughin' up stuff on his desk when the storage locker rent remains unpaid for a few months. In a way, Rick is sitting on several pots of gold and/or crap at the same time. Damn, some people really need to smarten up and relearn their math when it comes to their means and consumerism.

So it looks like one of the storage lockers coughed up a pinball machine, and unfortunately for Rick he got caught up into a nostalgia trip when he saw it. He is about 50 years old, so the demographic speaks for itself when it comes to pinball machines from the late 70's. His first folly was to put it in his office. He then realized that it was too much fun to have while trying to work in a small office, so he would eventually move it to his home. Before doing just that he called on me when the machine started messing up at the scoring level. Rick told me that the numbers would start counting by themselves after an hour or so of the machine being on, but I reckoned that what he saw was mostly flicker. So after asking him a few more questions to make the preliminary diagnostic before moving my act over to his location, I felt pretty confident about the cold solder theory. The rest of the machine was behaving, so I took the call, knowing that this was going to be a breeze - cold solder on some or all of the 6 digit displays. He asked if we should do the service call at his office or at his home. I suggested that he should move the machine to where it would live for the next few years, and jokingly added that these older citizens generally don't like to be moved, and that I'd rather take care of the problems when it was settled into its new residence. Silence, I think it made him nervous that I spoke about the pinball in the same way that I would speak about a senior citizen.

So when Rick moved it to it's possibly final playing place, he called me and said that the problem was happening more often now. I asked if he had removed her head before moving it out of the building and to the home.

"Yes", came the answer, along with a couple curses about what he and his buddy went through to get the backbox opened.

Hey, when you don't know what that key unlocks, it gets tricky, but they managed. And now that it was reassembled, it was acting weird. He told me that he could still play and enjoy it, so no rush for the service call and just to call him if I was in the area and had some time.

"Just call me an hour or so before and I will make myself available" he said, and continued, ".... an advantage of being self employed."

Rick struck me as one of those very well adjusted, smile prone and very pleasant "cool guys" who had settled into a lifestyle that suited him fine. He had made firm decisions about the important things that concern men in our age group and nobody was going to mess with that. I understood everything he talked about that evening as I checked out this pinball machine and looked for weaknesses.

So tonight after working another exhaustive day for "the man" in the crazy landscape of the amusement industry which lately seems to be laced with false urgencies that still tend to rattle my cage, I simply called Rick.

"OK", he said, "I'll be home in 30 minutes."

I had asked Rick to turn it on as soon as he got home so that the heat could build up in the backbox in order to encourage the problem to occur as he had described it over the phone. Got there pretty quick myself, and the machine hadn't failed yet.

No such luck, didn't see the problem. I powered it up over and over again and it booted flawlessly, no hassles and passed all her tests with flying colours. I asked him how long this thing was in storage, Rick said about five years. The MPU battery looked fine, hadn't leaked and held the memory when we reprogrammed the scores. I was impressed. I hadn't yet noticed the former operators sticker on the apron before opening the backdoor to look at the circuits and the connectors for cold solder while sticking to the plan I had in mind. I turned the machine off and disconnected the displays and removed them one by one from their saddles and got out the magnifying glass to look for cold solder around the connector pins, especially the ones at both extremeties. They were all previously reflowed and solid. Fawk, and that was the case for all 5 displays. Not saying much to the client about my false cocky phone diagnostic, I plugged them back in and put the fucker into display test and went to wiggle J1 on the MPU. Sure enough the symptom appeared. Cleaned the connector with an electricians eraser and reseated the bastard firmly. Jiggle - and no flicker on any of the displays. This was not a great repair, the great repair had taken place about 10 years ago and that is why my job was so easy tonight.

The sticker on the apron read "Techno Jeux" out of Québec city. They are clients of mine at the "corporate fishstore" to this day and I have known them as very meticulous operators turned service company as well. Have been doing business with them for my employers since the days of Laniel Automatic at the turn of the millennium. I will call them tomorrow and talk to Marc their main tech and thank him for the easy service call tonight. All I had left to do was secure the cables inside their supporting wire clips so no undue pressure would be imposed on the circuit board connectors due to gravity. Rick and his buddy couldn't have known where to secure the connector cables when they finally got the door open and ran them up to the circuit boards. "A" for effort though.

Robert A. Baraké  (R.A.B.)

STORY DATE - November 2013 / LOCATION - Dollard-des-Ormaux, Québec

Had to shuffle my schedual at the last minute after work today and ended up doing a service call in the west island instead of tomorrow night. It always amazes me how accommodating  clients can be when I suddenly have a slot open up for home service. People want to play pinball again.

A fella named Rick had called me a while back for an appointment.  A very hip and sharp self made man, who lives alone in a modest super clean orderly house in the burbs. The place is pure, simple, modern and uncluttered, he must have seen his share of crap I thought. Indeed, because for a living Rick runs a large storage locker facility. Good business - real estate combined with people's need to own too much stuff and wanting to hang on to it for some reason or another. Even after purchasing these things, it keeps costing people money long after. What a gold mine, it costs money just to keep stuff even when you hardly ever use it. It is almost like interest on a credit card, you keep paying for stuff after you bought it, even after using it up and throwing it out in some cases you may still be paying for it somehow. Brilliant. Add to this the fact that people are being squeezed financially left and right and some of Rick's lockers just end up coughin' up stuff on his desk when the storage locker rent remains unpaid for a few months. In a way, Rick is sitting on several pots of gold and/or crap at the same time. Damn, some people really need to smarten up and relearn their math when it comes to their means and consumerism.

So it looks like one of the storage lockers coughed up a pinball machine, and unfortunately for Rick he got caught up into a nostalgia trip when he saw it. He is about 50 years old, so the demographic speaks for itself when it comes to pinball machines from the late 70's. His first folly was to put it in his office. He then realized that it was too much fun to have while trying to work in a small office, so he would eventually move it to his home. Before doing just that he called on me when the machine started messing up at the scoring level. Rick told me that the numbers would start counting by themselves after an hour or so of the machine being on, but I reckoned that what he saw was mostly flicker. So after asking him a few more questions to make the preliminary diagnostic before moving my act over to his location, I felt pretty confident about the cold solder theory. The rest of the machine was behaving, so I took the call, knowing that this was going to be a breeze - cold solder on some or all of the 6 digit displays. He asked if we should do the service call at his office or at his home. I suggested that he should move the machine to where it would live for the next few years, and jokingly added that these older citizens generally don't like to be moved, and that I'd rather take care of the problems when it was settled into its new residence. Silence, I think it made him nervous that I spoke about the pinball in the same way that I would speak about a senior citizen.

So when Rick moved it to it's possibly final playing place, he called me and said that the problem was happening more often now. I asked if he had removed her head before moving it out of the building and to the home.

"Yes", came the answer, along with a couple curses about what he and his buddy went through to get the backbox opened.

Hey, when you don't know what that key unlocks, it gets tricky, but they managed. And now that it was reassembled, it was acting weird. He told me that he could still play and enjoy it, so no rush for the service call and just to call him if I was in the area and had some time.

"Just call me an hour or so before and I will make myself available" he said, and continued, ".... an advantage of being self employed."

Rick struck me as one of those very well adjusted, smile prone and very pleasant "cool guys" who had settled into a lifestyle that suited him fine. He had made firm decisions about the important things that concern men in our age group and nobody was going to mess with that. I understood everything he talked about that evening as I checked out this pinball machine and looked for weaknesses.

So tonight after working another exhaustive day for "the man" in the crazy landscape of the amusement industry which lately seems to be laced with false urgencies that still tend to rattle my cage, I simply called Rick.

"OK", he said, "I'll be home in 30 minutes."

I had asked Rick to turn it on as soon as he got home so that the heat could build up in the backbox in order to encourage the problem to occur as he had described it over the phone. Got there pretty quick myself, and the machine hadn't failed yet.

No such luck, didn't see the problem. I powered it up over and over again and it booted flawlessly, no hassles and passed all her tests with flying colours. I asked him how long this thing was in storage, Rick said about five years. The MPU battery looked fine, hadn't leaked and held the memory when we reprogrammed the scores. I was impressed. I hadn't yet noticed the former operators sticker on the apron before opening the backdoor to look at the circuits and the connectors for cold solder while sticking to the plan I had in mind. I turned the machine off and disconnected the displays and removed them one by one from their saddles and got out the magnifying glass to look for cold solder around the connector pins, especially the ones at both extremeties. They were all previously reflowed and solid. Fawk, and that was the case for all 5 displays. Not saying much to the client about my false cocky phone diagnostic, I plugged them back in and put the fucker into display test and went to wiggle J1 on the MPU. Sure enough the symptom appeared. Cleaned the connector with an electricians eraser and reseated the bastard firmly. Jiggle - and no flicker on any of the displays. This was not a great repair, the great repair had taken place about 10 years ago and that is why my job was so easy tonight.

The sticker on the apron read "Techno Jeux" out of Québec city. They are clients of mine at the "corporate fishstore" to this day and I have known them as very meticulous operators turned service company as well. Have been doing business with them for my employers since the days of Laniel Automatic at the turn of the millennium. I will call them tomorrow and talk to Marc their main tech and thank him for the easy service call tonight. All I had left to do was secure the cables inside their supporting wire clips so no undue pressure would be imposed on the circuit board connectors due to gravity. Rick and his buddy couldn't have known where to secure the connector cables when they finally got the door open and ran them up to the circuit boards. "A" for effort though.

Robert A. Baraké  (R.A.B.)