Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Broken MDT

Each time we touch the screen on the MDT, it beeps. Today, the MDT went nuts, and started beeping on it's own at random, and wouldn't let me press "At Scene" on a job so I had to ask control on the radio to book me on scene.

I finished the job, and decided to re-boot the MDT to see if that would fix it - you know, like when your computer at home or in the office goes potty, you turn it off, turn it back on and usually it works fine again. Well the MDT worked fine for about a minute, then it started doing it again, and this time I noticed that the cursor was jumping around at the bottom of the screen.

So off I trundled to the MDT menders. The engineer came out and had a look and a press around on the screen then said "It just needs re-calibrating." I have to say I wasn't convinced, but hey, he's the engineer and he knows more about the system than I do. So he plugged in his keyboard and ran the program to re-calibrate the touch screen.
Half way through, it started doing it again.

The engineer lost his temper and punched the screen. The screen protested at this treatment by rewarding him with a spiderweb type pattern on the screen. He'd broken it. Despite my best efforts, I couldn't stop myself from laughing. He shrugged his shoulders and said it had needed a new screen anyway, then spent the next half an hour fiddling in tight spaces to get the screen off it's mounting, and replaced it with a new one. Whilst doing this, he told me they'd had several MDTs with broken screens, but this is the first one he'd broken. I suspect he now understands why they came in with broken screens.

I took a picture of the broken screen with my phone, and as soon as I can work out how to get the bloody bluetooth dongle working on my computer, I'll copy it across and post it on here.

3 Comments:

Blogger minifig said...

Pardon my ignorance, but what's an MDT?

9:43 pm  
Blogger Steve said...

Sorry - I knew I should have explained better!

An MDT (Mobile Data Terminal) is the mobile computer that's fitted to the FRUs and ambulances that receive and display the details of calls, such as address, what's happened, whether the patient is conscious and breathing etc.

It means that ambulances can be dispatched much faster as the other method was to do it pen & paper, and look up the address in a map book. Instead, when control send a job down to the MDT, the computer automatically programmes the Satellite Navigation system. The only problem with that is it isn't always correct and is prone to trying to send you the wrong way sometimes.

Hope that helps

10:10 pm  
Blogger PC Disillusioned said...

Still waiting for the picture :)

2:01 am  

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