February 16, 1995
Getting in touch with sweethearts -- or conducting routine business -- was a little tricky for those depending on campus phones on Valentine's Day.
Phones in residence halls and offices were out for three hours Tuesday morning as a problem during scheduled routine maintenance brought the entire system down unexpectedly.
At 7:30 a.m., a Nippon Electronics Corporation technician began replacing circuit boards in an NEC switching cabinet that was added to handle phone lines for the new Humanities Building nine months ago, said Mike Grodzicki, manager of telecommunications at SF State.
But a "jury rigged situation" left by an NEC field service engineer caused the system to crash when the new boards were installed, Grodzicki said.
"Normally, it would be a simple matter to take out the new boards, put the old boards back in and be back up in 10 minutes," he said. But the NEC engineer, who had flown up from Los Angeles to fix a static problem on the new Humanities lines last September, had modified the system so that the computer processor linking all eight of the universities switching cabinets could no longer recognize the boards, Grodzicki said.
"Because of the jury-rigging situation, the problem was beyond the on-site technician's abilities," he said. "If it was left in that state, there should have been some documentation left (by NEC) so we would know to modify procedures when changing system cards," Grodzicki said.
The phones went down at 7:55 a.m. and NEC engineers were summoned from Pleasanton.
The NEC engineers were on the scene by 10 a.m. and had deduced how the system had been modified and restored service by 11 a.m.
Some students were inconvenienced more than others.
"I didn't even notice. None of us get up before 11 a.m.," said Alan Wiley, an undeclared major speaking for a group of five students enjoying the afternoon sunshine outside the Residence Apartments Tuesday afternoon.
"Mine didn't work last night or the day before either, but I think that's because I didn't pay the bill," said another in the group of apartment residents, English major Julie Mawod.
"Pooh" Tihad -- "tiny conversational hearts major" -- said her neighbor borrowed her phone to call her boyfriend long distance for Valentine's Day.
The others in the group, psychology major Mitch Jeserich and electrical engineering major Matt Minix, were unphased by the outage -- although Minix made it clear that it wasn't because he slept through the whole thing.
"I do get up before eleven," Minix stated for the record.
Not all the phones on campus went down, Grodzicki said. Mary Ward Hall has its own switching cabinet, so some students were able to get a dial tone and talk to other students in the hall, but "trunk" connections to the outside world were down, preventing off-campus calls.
Student and office phones maintained by Pacific Bell, as well as pay phones, were unaffected.
It was the longest outage since the NEC Neac 2400 switchers were installed in August 1987.
Under a contractual agreement with the university, NEC technicians were required to arrive on the scene within two hours, and fix the problem in another two hours.
Although NEC met the conditions, Grodzicki said he was asking that the company investigate the incident and report back to the university in writing, "to ensure that this kind of situation doesn't happen again."