Machines at Work??

Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP)

Elder Moulder on the front steps of the HSP

Years ago I saw a wonderful cartoon.  I don’t remember who the character was, but he was all alone and it went like this:

First frame: “I’m down.”

Second frame: “Down. (Sigh)”

Third frame: “Down, down.”

Fourth frame: “Down, dooby doo down down…”

Last frame: “Comma, comma, down dooby doo down down….”

This describes our week.

We have had a week of struggles with equipment and it could have been discouraging except that we know why we are here and we know that if it was going to happen to somebody, why not us?  So we are making the best of being where we are supposed to be and trying to overcome the obstacles.

So here are our obstacles:  We broke our machines.  Both of them.  We are dead in the water and aren’t getting anything done.

Well….WE didn’t really break the machines (at least that is what our supervisors in Utah tell us over the phone) but we still feel responsible because it happened on our watch and there is no one who has been able to figure out what is going on yet.  I do say “yet” because I have hope.

Let me explain our situation a little more in detail.  Here is a picture of the Copibook scanner I work on. 

My work station

I took a photo of it with my first project, a wonderful, old, falling apart book from about 1880.  

This book was saved for me by the former couple because they worked on a different scanner, the Zeutschel, a German made scanner which is what Ed spent most of his time training on.  

The Copibook scanner I am most familiar with is a French made scanner and can handle these types of books more easily because of a feature on the machine which allows the spine of the books to be cradled lower than the sides of the books, making the opened book flatter which creates better scans.

This old book is falling apart, but not in too bad of shape.  It was difficult because it is essentially a scrapbook of correspondence kept by one man who was writing to people to gather family information in 1875-1880 and he kept the responses he received in this book.  These responses were glued onto the pages any way he could to be sure they were readable and he folded them up and put some close enough together that they were basically like a puzzle. 





To scan these pages I had to unfold and turn the book and then refold to get to the other letters on the page.  It was a challenge, but doable. It took me essentially 3 days to complete this book.  When finished I had 917 images from this book.  It was good work, but not very fast.

I completed this book on Monday, March 6.  All was well.  I completed several other projects the same day and added more images on Tuesday, March 7. Ed had finished some administrative work and was ready to begin scanning on Tuesday but when he went to start up the Zeutschel it wouldn’t start up.  This was discouraging because this machine had replaced another Zeutschel that had broken last October so it wasn’t very old.

Then on Wednesday afternoon the Copibook had a problem and stopped responding except with error messages. 

We cannot figure out why we keep getting this error!!

We were both shut down!! (dooby doo down down)

The rest of the week was spent on the phone with smarter people than us, trying to get the Copibook up and running again.  A new module was sent and Ed and I had to become technicians very quickly to open the back of the machine (very carefully and with detailed instructions coming from my phone) and replacing this module and the leads.  

Seriously???? You want us to do what?????

(Did we really sign up for this? This machine is a lot of money!!) But we did it and that fix didn’t fix the problem, so by Friday afternoon the technician from Dallas opened a “back door” for me to use to at least get some work done.  It worked for 1 ½ hours and then shut down again. 

The decision on the Zeutschel is to send it back to Utah and they will send us another on.  The Copibook is still out of commission and we don’t have a decision on it yet.  We will see tomorrow what the week will bring.

So basically, we left on Friday with very little work done for the week and on pins and needles for this week.  But……that didn’t spoil our weekend.

I went to my first event in downtown Philly with Ed’s sister (Judy) and cousin (Trish).  It was the Philadelphia Flower Show at the Convention Center a huge building that is spread over four blocks.
The theme this year was "Holland" so the bridge with the bikes, the windmills, the "white bikes" display along with lots of tulips and other bulb flowers. 

Just in case you didn't know what the White Bike Plan was.

This is what I brought back from the flower show....

After that we had a family get together on Saturday night with more family.  It was fun to be together with these family members who we didn’t see very often over the years.  Now that we are here for a year it will be nice to have more time together. 

It was a good evening sharing stories from family times growing up.  We laughed and had a few somber moments, but mostly laughed together.  Most of the stories I had never heard so it was priceless for me.  I think everyone left with a little more thought about writing things down. 

Maybe we all should!