5 Things that drove me insane in robot service

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Complaining is the Polish national sport. Not football, not volleyball, not ski jumping. Complaining. The only discipline where we truly stand a chance at gold. At every Olympics, regardless of weather conditions or the team’s form.

And that’s fine. Sometimes you need it. How long can you keep repeating that robots are wonderful, precise, and future-proof? Because they are. But they can also be infuriating. So infuriating that you dream of throwing a size-22 wrench in their face and disappearing into the Bieszczady mountains – a Polish symbol of running away from everything. To herd sheep, drink tea from a thermos, and stare at the sky.

So today – instead of another love letter – here’s the

Top 5 things that really drove me insane while working in service.

Number one, without competition: calibration. Just the sound of this word gives me chills. Robots are precise to the point of cruelty. They’d measure a hair in micrometers if you told them to. But inside their heads? Nothing. Zero intelligence. No artificial brainpower, just machines built to repeat. The problem begins when something shifts by a millimeter. Suddenly surgical precision turns into the movements of a drunk uncle at a wedding. And then it begins: recalibration. Point by point. No mercy.

I remember Romania. Eight hours of work, followed by eight more of correcting over forty points. Head pounding, eyes popping out of my skull. And to top it off, the car radio was broken, so we listened to the same sixteen tracks from a CD on repeat. A musical trauma that haunts me to this day.

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Second place goes to access to robots. Picture a T-34 tank – the heavy, clunky Soviet tank from World War II. That’s what some production cells look like. Machine designers seem to believe that a service technician is a flat creature, without ribs or lungs. Access? Why bother. Space? Every square meter of the hall is money, so the tighter the better. Sometimes you couldn’t even unscrew a cover because the wrench wouldn’t fit. Other times you had to crawl into gaps that even a cat would consider too cramped.

My favorite memory? A company making game consoles. The robot was boxed in so tightly it was hard to breathe. We had to replace the belt on the first axis – hidden down at the base, below the table. Marcin, my colleague, red as a brick, handed me a screw and said: “Finish it.” One careless move – and plop. The screw vanished into the abyss. Sweat, fear, and tears. To this day I don’t know where it ended up. Maybe it’s in orbit.

Third place – lack of communication. You’ve got a plan, a diagnosis, contacts. You arrive. And suddenly it turns out no one knows anything. The contact person has vanished, the phone is dead, and you’re standing there like an idiot with your suitcase.

Sometimes someone does appear. An engineer on the other side. But that often makes it worse. He looks at you, nods, shrugs. Pure indifference. As if all this were happening in some other world, not his factory. And that’s the most frustrating part – because the robot is only one element of the puzzle. It needs signals from the machine, conversations with the rest of the automation. Without that, it won’t move a millimeter. Thirty percent of the problems would disappear if people simply talked to each other. But instead they choose silence and waste everyone’s time.

Fourth place goes to the never-ending resets. Some robots act as if they were still living in the age of Windows 95. Every, even the tiniest, change requires a restart. You upload parameters – reset. Another tweak – reset. And again you wait. Minutes, sometimes hours.

And the worst part: it wasn’t just the robot. There were IT procedures on top of it all. To upload anything, I had to log into the computer. Every change of parameters meant another login. Click a button – login. Adjust a setting – login again. The password had to be typed in manually, copy-paste disabled. And suddenly those short resets turned into a pointless marathon, where half the time you weren’t with the machine but in front of a screen, fighting the system. After three hours, you just wanted to smash the monitor against the wall and walk out.

And finally, number five, the crème de la crème – the know-it-all pest. The guy who knows better. He stands there, commenting on your every move. He’d do it faster, better, smarter. If he could, he’d correct the way you breathe. In those moments, all I dreamed of was noise-canceling headphones. And a world where the smart-asses just sit quietly.

Complaining has a bad reputation. But sometimes it’s necessary. It reminds us that alongside the grand visions of technology, there’s also everyday life: tedious, frustrating, sometimes downright stupid. Robots are fascinating. But living with them – exhausting. And maybe that’s the point. Because if everything worked perfectly, there’d be nothing to write about.

And this way? There’s always material for another column.

Cheers, Jacek !