My whole life has been nothing but a non-stop battle fighting with the negators.
A negator is someone who strives to do what they can to downplay or negate the contributions of someone, especially when that person is vulnerable to attacks due to circumstances beyond their control.
And in a first, I actually tried out ChatGPT and this is what it had to say when I asked it if the word “negator” could be applied to a person:
“He was a negator in the cruelest sense — untouched by hardship, yet quick to dismiss those who bore the weight of the world. He didn’t just lack empathy; he negated pain itself, as if it was a fiction made up by the weak.”
Yep, this describes three people in particular.
I find myself in a really odd position where I work. And it’s not just at my current position, it’s been at each and every position that I’ve ever held.
As I’ve mentioned before, I find myself employed in positions far below my skill levels. I grew up in a household that was dysfunctional. I grew up in isolated military communities that would do whatever was required to hide the dysfunction and the abuse within the PMQs from the public eye.
My father joined the Royal Canadian Navy in 1963 with a grade 8 education. The military taught him everything he needed to know, like avionics, electronics, mechanics, etc.
Do you honestly think that a piss tank alcoholic with rage issues that lucked out when he was able to join the Royal Canadian Navy in 1963 honestly gave a flying fuck about school, or college, or trade school, or university?
Nope.
As I said before, Richard hated my teachers.
To Richard, school was nothing more than a babysitting service that was just supposed to be teaching the kids the basics. Anything beyond that was a fucking waste of his time.
Just after I left home when I was 16 I was working for a company where one of the owners was putting his son through trade school for carpentry. Kid needed tools for his apprenticeship, his father got him tools for his apprenticeship. His father helped him with the cost of living.
I worked for another business where the mother sent her son to an upper class private school in the States.
Even at work, the other guys in my department are always gushing about how far their kids are going, and what trades or business sector they’re getting into.
But I get to enjoy the negators.
And the negators are a miserable lot. At least they come off as miserable to me. I know that they enjoy negating me. You can see the joy in their smugness.
Some of the work that I’ve done recently involves adding Modbus gateways, Bacnet routers, NAT devices, and even ethernet to fibre media converters.
No doubt that if the negators found out what I’ve done that they’d make noise with IMIT and senior leadership and get all of the devices that I’ve installed yanked off the network.
The first device that I connected to the hospital IT network was the Franklin Fuel Monitor. I did this about 2019. This had to be done. The Franklin Fuel Monitor came from the factory with a full blown webserver built in and the ability to send email messages.
For some reason when this device was installed as part of the generator upgrades someone made the decision to have the existing building automation system just monitor the status relay outputs and the 4-20mA outputs of this panel.
Having the building automation system monitor the Franklin monitor was a joke. Our two Diesel tanks are cylinders with hemispheres for ends. The 4-20 mA signal represents the fuel level in centimetres. The Franklin monitor had the built in correction tables to convert the height of fuel to actual volume. The building automation system treated the fuel tanks like they were cubes. The fuel level displayed by the building automation system was a joke. It never matched what was actually in the tanks.
Once I got the Franklin on the hospital network we were able to see the exact fuel levels, which helps the shift engineers greatly when the tanks are being filled. The system can now send out email reports once a week to our fuel supplier so that they can keep our tanks filled up. And the system can send out emergency requests to the fuel supplier in the instances where the generators have been run for an extended period of time and have dropped the tanks below 3,000 litres of ullage.
Then next came the four Amico medical gas alarm panels. Then the Dixell webservers. Then the Modbus gateways. Then the BACnet routers. Then the NATs.
Not bad for a grade 8 drop out, eh?
Not bad for someone who suffered not only gross child sexual abuse on a Canadian Armed Forces base, but also had to live through the ham fisted manner in which the Canadian Armed Forces chose to deal with it.
Not bad for someone who grew up with a piss tank alcoholic father in the Canadian Armed Forces who stood by and did sweet bugger fuck all.
The negators don’t like this.
They hate this
They despise this.
People like me are fuckups.
We’re not supposed to amount to anything.
People like me are supposed to stay in our lane.
There are three primary negators where I work. Luckily they’re all over at the new site, so I don’t have to deal with them. Unfortunately they still make their presence known. And once you’ve had an encounter with a negator, you don’t recover from this.
One of the first automation systems that I installed in the hospital was the Dixell webserver for the kitchen refrigeration.
This wasn’t supposed to involve networking or webservers or modbus gateways, it just evolved into that.
Originally electromechanical thermostats with separate thermostats for over temperature alarms controlled and monitored the refrigeration systems for the walk-in coolers and freezers in the 1st floor and 4th floor kitchen. The freezers had time clocks to run defrost cycles whether or not the coils needed it, and the time cycle was arbitrary and ended whether or not the coils were cleared of ice. The evaporator fans would stay running when the doors were open.
Because of the crappy alarm monitoring the engineers would get hit with at least two dozen false alarms every shift. And at three shifts per day, that’s a lot of false alarms.
So I hunted around for a solution and that’s when I came across the Dixell XW60K walk in refrigeration controller. Got some pricing from our local refrigeration wholesaler for 20 of these units. Put in the budget request with the required justifications and the request was approved.
When the devices arrived on site I was going over the wiring diagrams and programming instructions and making plans for the swap out without shutting down the refrigeration for any excessive length of time. I was going over the wiring requirements for these devices when a port on the back of the case piqued my interest. All it said was Hotkey/TTL-RS-485. I knew what the hotkey was, it was a tool that you could use to transfer the basic programming from one controller to another. And I knew that TTL stood for transistor-transistor logic. And I knew that RS-485 was a two wire serial network. So I fired off an email to Dixell asking what this was for. Dixell replied that it was their Modbus interface adapter that would allow these controllers to be networked for a monitoring system. The tech rep with Dixell also mentioned that Dixell offered a webserver that was easy to program and interface so that the refrigeration units could be viewed on graphical pages as well as having the alarms sent out based upon a call out list.
Long story short, the Dixell system was an instant hit in the kitchen.
The number of false alarms plummeted. As the controller was initiating the defrost cycle in the freezer it would ignore the rise in cabinet temperature until 10 minutes after the defrost cycle ended. The cooler and freezer fans now turn off when the doors are open. There is an alarm delay for after the door has been opened and then closed to allow for the unit to get back to setpoint after the unit has been loaded up with new product. And if the kitchen staff leave the cooler or freezer doors open for too long, the kitchen managers get an alarm page.
Here’s where things get even more interesting. As I said we have a kitchen on the 1st floor and a kitchen on the 4th floor. To monitor the upstairs kitchen I had three options. Install a second webserver upstairs. Run some RS-485 network wiring up to the 4th from the 1st. Or install a IP to Modbus gateway on the 4th and have the webserver use the existing hospital network to poll the 4th floor refrigeration.
This was my first experience with MOXA networking interfaces.
As I said, this system has been in and running since 2019 without a hitch.
The Dixell system ended up expanding through the hospital.
There’s a Dixell system in the pharmacy that not only monitors the refrigeration in the pharmacy on site, but also a pharmacy at another hospital about 4km away.
There’s a Dixell system in Transfusion Medicine that not only monitors the refrigeration on site, it also monitors refrigeration at a different hospital as well.
Yep, the Dixell system even monitors the morgue and some specimen freezers for the pathology / histology department.
All of the black blobs above are covering the hospital’s internal IP addresses. The hospital’s network is behind a massive firewall and there is no direct connection from the intranet to the internet. Everything coming in and going out passes through servers. But, once the negators catch wind that I published Class B non-routable private IP addressed on the internet, the howling would be intense.
Believe me, if my life had allowed me to take certification courses and trade qualification, do you think I would have passed on this?
Do you honestly think that if I didn’t have my father and Captain Totzke screaming in my head non-stop that I’m an imposter, that I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing, that I’d be anywhere near where I am now?
You don’t think that each and every day of my fucking life is a non-stop review of what could have been.
See, the negators will always come up with arguments to explain why what I’ve done isn’t really anything special.
I didn’t create copper wire, so how can I say that I can do network wiring?
I didn’t write the RS-485 MS/TP standard, so I’m lying when I say that I’ve installed MS/TP network.
I didn’t actually build the Dixell controllers or write the programming contained within, so I’m just a desperate asshole trying to take credit where no credit is due.
But, such is my life.
Especially when the negators smell the stench of a dysfunctional childhood and come out for the attack.
Beeshive 