The problem was of the stuff that engineering nightmares are made
from.

In the heat and dehydration of a 40 degree day I had made a change to
a PLC program, instead of tracing the code back to the input bit I had
mistakenly edited the change into an intermediate bit in the logic.
A single line of code was stuffed.

On another site 20 miles away I needed to add two parameters to a
Cisco router to get a network access point functioning and then add
two lines of parameters in an initialisation file.

While we were contractually obligated to do the work the logistics
were staggering. $1,200 potentially for the airfare, $120 a day for a
car, $95 a night in the camp, days spent negotiating access. Two
people for remote work for safety and those changes to 4 little lines
of code 578 nautical miles away in the outback looked like costing up
to a thousand dollars a line.

They were potentially the final touches to the entire job but even so
there was great reluctance to commit to the work. It was all so
staggeringly expensive for what was to be achieved.

Stealth Pilot wrote: