Tuesday morning... we're just starting to wake up, a call come from the store - the Linea is acting up. Steam is coming out all over... except through the steam wands... we had to shut it down... can you call service and get in here to help?
Go to start car... doesn't start. Dead battery. No time to jump the battery. So both of us come in with the other car.
Call the service contract folks. "We'll get you on the schedule," they say. "No, it's got to happen NOW." "Um, OK, we'll get somebody to stop over on their way in this morning."
10 minutes later we're at the shop, line is several folks deep. Belle has the Cimbali up and running on the side counter, but the Mazzer grinder is too heavy to move and the portafilters don't fit the Swift grinder so how to do the decaf requests since we've only got the one Cimbali portafilter and only one Mazzer grinder working? (Instead of pre-grinding, we decide to take the spring out of a La Marzocco basket, filling it on the Swift, then popping it into the Cimbali portafilter). We get the Mazzer moved over so there's no running back and forth. Just in time for a triple decaf order...
And then the register stops working. How does a cash register run out of memory???? Now the line is getting 10 deep, we're still taking and fulfilling orders, but we can't process anything but cash for about 15 looooong minutes until Melanie figures it out and reboots.
Service guy comes and after a bit of poking around the Linea says those magic words... "I've never seen this before. It's not supposed to do that." The brains of our machine are more or less fried. And the boiler is flooded (we can see that... but why?). The CPU is an expensive part to replace. And it's got to come from Seattle - there's not one to be found in Pittsburgh. So can't fix it today.
Once the morning rush calms down a little bit we move the Cimbali to the back counter. We can still nurse good shots out of the Linea, but not steam. We're steaming off the Cimbali. It's awkward, but it works. More importantly, drink quality isn't affected one iota.
And that's where we're still at as of this morning. Service was supposed to be here at 8:30pm, but it's snowing and of course all bets are off as to timing. Meantime some other plumbers who are supposed to install a backflow meter for the whole building want to do things NOW instead of this afternoon when they're supposed to come. Naturally they want to shut the water off for a couple of hours. Come back later when you're supposed to, thanks...
On the bright side, the car battery was under warranty. And we're looking forward to cupping some great Ethiopians this afternoon. Assuming we have water, that is.
Good thing we've got equipment redundancies and folks who know what they're doing. This is when all that barista training and the expense of a second machine comes in handy. Running a morning rush on a one-group is not for the meek.
If you're in this morning, it might take a few seconds longer than normal to serve you until the Linea is fully operational again. It's only temporary, so thanks for your patience.
UPDATE: Conversations late last night with ESI techs in Seattle indicated it might be a faulty flowmeter connected to the left keypad. If it wasn't holding sufficient ohms it would send screwy signals to everything it's connected with (which is almost everything in the machine). So we tested that this morning instead of waiting for the CPU and IT WORKED. Yippee. We're back rocking the Linea, steam and all.
Ooh. Not fun. I am guessing that may also have something to do with why the hot water tap was turning on when pulling shots this Sunday? At least I can't be blamed, I didn't even get to touch it all night long! Good to here you are up and running again.
Posted by: Sean | December 05, 2007 at 12:16 PM