Today I was at an architectural office to see the owner on an unrelated matter to our business. While waiting to meet with the owner I heard the staff talking about a problem with one of their network plotters.

Not wanting to but in, I kept quiet until the owner asked if I knew anything about network attached printers and such. I told them that I could take a quick look at it and see if it was something that could be taken care of quickly.

After some investigation I asked if they had been having power problems and the answer was yes for the past several days.

The problem was they had the plotter set up to be assigned its network address automatically. Network plotters and printers need to have a fixed address so the client computers will always know where to send the information to be printed or plotted.

They then set up the plotter so they could always access it on the same network address.

The owner was so pleased with the speed I was able to rectify the situation, because they had an important client in the office waiting for the drawings to be printed and signed by the architect.

Now the Architect wants to talk about a support contract.

Submitted by Tom