Self-Service Ticket Machines

SSTMs or TVMs. Call them what you will, they break down now and again. It's a fact of life with such things.

Goes without saying that ours died again, though it was more unusual this time, in that it was in a constant reboot cycle. It'd get a certain way into the boot sequence, flash up a Command Box briefly, then reboot, ad infinitum. I duly reported this to the manufacturer via their Helpdesk, and followed it up with a call to Control to advise them of the situation.

A couple of days later, the machine was still not working, so I rang back to chase it up, and was told that they'd put the call on hold because they had been unable to connect to the machine to investigate! Bearing in mind that I had told them exactly what the problem was when I reported it, you'd think they'd have realised that they'd be unable to connect.

To cut a long story short, an Engineer came out next day, and took the PC out of the unit to take it back to their base for repair. When he returned with the supposedly fixed unit, he put it back on its shelf and started to connect it up, when he discovered that they had removed an essential component and neglected to replace it, namely the multiport Serial Card that the printers and cash handling mechanism connected to. Ho hum...