When a product is not what it seems...

[Brumby]

This is a short story about a mother who needed to find a nebuliser for her daughter.  There was one in the house, but it hadn't been needed since they moved recently.  Now one was needed and the old one couldn't be found.

No choice - the mum went out to buy a new one.

Brings it home, unpacks it and sets it up complete with medication.  She turns it on - and .... nothing.  She goes over everything and still no luck.

I get a call from a now anxious mother.  I ask her if she's gone through the instructions, but she tells me there weren't any.  She looks them up on the internet and says there is nothing special mentioned.  I asked if there was a fuse and I'm told there is an internal thermal fuse which isn't replaceable.  (Yeah, well...)

By chance I was only a few minutes away, so I drop in to check the unit.

Power cord tested ok, but the unit itself showed open circuit with the switch in either direction.  There didn't seem to be any logical reason for it not to work, unless it was a faulty unit that had found it's way back on the shelf.  The lack of manual and warranty documentation made me wonder, but apparently it came sealed up like a new unit.

As a last check before giving up (I wasn't going to open up a new unit) I flipped it over to check the compliance sticker for power requirements.  This is when the problem became extremely obvious....

(Who's worked it out...?)

[Rbastler]

It needs to much power or is 115V ?

[rrinker]

 Was gonna say, someone shipped a US model to Australia.

[Brumby]

The truth is even more bizarre....


Instead of Voltage and Frequency information, I read the following:

ENGINEERING SAMPLE.    NOT FOR SALE
           NOT WORKING UNIT

Fortunately, this was Thursday evening - late night shopping here.  After showing the mum, I told her to take it back and see if they could get it working.   

She told me it took a third member of staff to find the problem (this was a Chemist/Pharmacy, BTW).

After a credit on that purchase, she bought another model and when she was asked if she wanted to test it, she responded with a quite assertive YES!.  Apparently the person who served her was taken aback a little by the intensity of the response.

When she asked about replacing the medication that had been wasted, they apparently said they couldn't do that and would have to contact the owner the next day.

[Rbastler]

Wow... just....wow

[Brumby]

I tried to get a photo - but the mother was flying out the door to get it replaced.  The one shot I was able to grab hadn't focused ... and I didn't get a second chance.

[Kjelt]

Quite the story. That company has some sorting out to do if the ESRs get shipped.
Tthat is a serious issue!

[Brumby]

Here's the photo.  Not proud of it - but you can make out some of what's there....



Kinda explains the lack of paperwork, too.

[b_force]

Late Friday afternoon shipment, jeeeez 

[SingedFingers]

This doesn't surprise me.

My wife had a Holter monitor attached to her for half a day. It had a BP cuff on it that was set to go off every 4 hours. The third time it went off in the middle of the night, the LCD display faded to oblivion, the cuff inflated to maximum and it locked up with the pump running causing bruising to her arm and a rather immediate panic as she was asleep when it kicked in. It lay on the bed inflating until one of the pressure connectors blew out.

Called the hospital department in the morning and they said "oh they do that sometimes".

Got another one (I checked the serial number was different). Exactly the same thing happened. Close inspection, these had "on trial" stickers on the bottom of them from the vendor, no CE approval, nothing...

Funny bloody sometimes.

Went back and complained and they apologised and said they wouldn't put them on people. Two weeks later, got a new one with a different bug in the software which caused it to go off every 10 minutes instead.

And there we have the ethical only, approval doused medical electronics. Fancy an auto-injector? Nope me neither.