Field technicians want to grab my tool and probe my things
The TV repair man returns for the IoT age
There’s a woman at the front door. She says she has come to twiddle my knob.
Here we go, you’re thinking: yet another ‘Autosave is for Wimps’ column opening with cheap sexual innuendo. Well, no, far from it. I have moved on from such puerile humour. No more cheap smut from me.
Allow me to put things into their proper context. The woman ringing the doorbell is an electronics service field technician. She is carrying a metal tool case in one hand and a ruggedised tablet in the other. She has been booked to investigate a faulty IoT control mechanism somewhere aux manoirs des Dabbs. It is perfectly straightforward. There is no sexual innuendo in this at all.
She tells me she cannot wait and demands that I show her my things immediately.
Sorry, I meant ‘Things’. The technician is here to deal with a problem with one of my Internet of Things devices.
My house is full of them. As faithful readers of my column will already know, I am a huge fan of IoT products – from stationary items such as my agenda-managing fridge-freezer to those that trundle about the house by themselves all day, such as many and various vacuum cleaners (I started with just the one but feared it might get lonely so I bought it some friends).
As Le Corbusier famously implied: a human is an organism that machines live around.
It turns out that one of my IoT devices broke down and refused to self-reboot, all unbeknown to me. The last thing it did before going offline was to send out a distress message to the manufacturer’s service agent, hence the unexpected service visit.
I lead the technician into the living room to inspect the offending IoT device which is sitting lifeless in the corner. She rests the toolbox next to it and, after passing me a torx screwdriver for a few moments, calls up a maintenance manual on the laptop. Her actions leave me no opportunity to make any further cheap sexual innuendo. None whatsoever.
She kneels down and grabs my tool…
Inconceivable though it may seem to Generation Z, when I was little, we used to be visited every now and again by a what we used to call a “television repair man”.
It would always be a man. He would drive up in a van prominently marked TV Repairs and enter the house dressed in a boiler suit and a hard-hat. He would throw down rubber mats, tether the TV to a cable as thick as my arm leading directly to the Earth’s core and insist that everyone stays well back or, preferably, leave the house altogether and retire to the nearest nuclear bunker (this was the 70s, remember) while he completed the life-threatening process of “re-aligning the electron guns”.
This sounded so exciting, like he was in Star Trek or something. In my childish imagination, I remember wondering whether, if two TV engineers should ever turn up at the same address by mistake, they would spring into a fight to the death like Kirk and Spock. Lord knows what I would have thought if any of them had ever turned up at the house wearing a red boiler suit: a gonner for sure.
Over the years, the TV repair man has vanished. Modern TVs are more reliable and relatively cheap to replace, and the options for fiddling around the back of an LCD or LED unit are not as varied as they were for gigantic CRT sets. TV repair men retrained as satellite dish installers, then had to find another career when the satellite dish craze ended. I heard many ended up retraining as licensed taxi drivers.
However, the commonplace sight of the suburban electrical maintenance engineer similar to the old TV repair man could be about to make a comeback thanks to the groundswell of interest in IoT devices in the home. As with connected and autonomous vehicles, before we know it, IoT will rapidly switch from unlikely PR silliness to real-world implementation in everyday domestic items.
It seems only a few years ago that robot vacuum cleaners were considered to be a space-age luxury; today, they’re piled up in the centre aisle at Aldi and Lidl.
As those of you who already work in the on-site hardware maintenance sector, the IoT equivalent of TV repair men will be called “field service technicians”. Instead of labelling their vans IoT Repairs, they will adhere to the modern tech brand convention that combines an inability to spell with an inexplicably compulsive fetish for InterCaps and dropped vowels – such as TekRpr, GajFix or BgrYshn.
And they will be in competition with each other in more ways than one. At least the old TV repair man only had to contend with standards such as UHF and domestic current, common to all TV sets. With IoT, there are no standards that manufacturers are prepared to adhere to. Every unit will be using proprietary software components jealously guarded by patents and screaming out radio noise like a tech-toddler-tantrum, provoking conflicts with all the other devices in your house.
As far as I can see, IoT manufacturers are tackling this problem by augmenting the leaky signal of their devices so that they drown out the din of everyone else’s.
I just thought… what if two field service technicians from competing manufacturers turn up at my door to turn up their signals at the same time? I can see this ending up with fisticuffs between the competitive technicians. Perhaps my youthful Star Trek-heightened imagination wasn’t far wrong. My advice? Wear a blue or yellow boiler suit and you’ll probably survive.
The technician in my living room has finished rebooting my IoT device. It was simply due a replacement for a slightly worn hardware component, she tells me. But not to worry, she has updated the firmware and next time this kind of issue arises, the device will contact the maintenance centre to put a replacement on order while messaging me a reminder that a maintenance visit might be due shortly.
This works, she explained, by the manufacturers keeping a virtual 3D working model of my unit back at the field service centre, the virtual device mirroring the real-world one. Oh, and a virtual 3D plan of my entire house, my movements within it and the products I consume so that it can bombard me with targeted advertising.
This is a good thing, she assures me. This is what IoT is for, I am reminded, as she scrolls through 527 screenfuls of Terms & Conditions and zooms in 4,000% to reveal the relevant clause, before zooming out and scrolling down the remaining 2,758 screenfuls to show me my acceptance tick at the bottom.
Silly me, of course it’s a good thing! It’s the same for my self-driving car which orders new tyres whenever it thinks the tread might begin to run thin at some indeterminate point in the future. Like how my office printer automatically orders fresh toner and ink cartridges to replace those that haven’t yet depleted. You’d have to be a real cynic to imagine that virtualisation was being used as another excuse to extort more cash out of us.
Another professional job done, the technician asks me to sign my name with my finger within a 20-pixel-high box on her tablet – I scrawl the customary geometrical zigzag that could be mistaken for anyone else’s signature, or indeed for a seismometer readout – and she begins collecting her implements.
In a plain and thoroughly innuendo-free manner, she asks me for me to hand back the screwdriver.
I obediently slip my tool into her box.
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. He apologises for thinking double-entendres are amusing. It is an affliction and he is seeking help. Indeed, just recently on a hospital visit he allowed himself to be taken in hand by the nurse. Frankly, he should be chased out of town – to the soundtrack of Yakety-Sax.
Oh Alistair you gullible fool, that was no IOT Field Service Technician, that was the scheduled maintenance on all of the spy kit installed in your house as kindly elucidated by you some weeks ago
We had TV repair chap with our last TV, early days of digital TV and the specifications kept changing. a number of software updates, a hardware change, left right swap over for the audio cables.
Final update was for the CAM. I still have the OnCAM somewhere.
10 years dervice then they changed the spec again and all of my DTTV kit was obsolete, luckily I had bought the LCD panel I still have, and the purchaser of my old TV had a sat box. Oh and I had a recent Humax HD PVR as well.
And I did not get a Monkey until he sold teabags.