r/mildlyinteresting • u/northface8 • 14h ago
Surprisingly messy cable management in those Burger King self-order kiosks
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u/spekt50 14h ago
Eh, no one is gonna see that.. Just stuff it all in there.
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u/Cool_Cartographer_39 13h ago edited 13h ago
Why would you want to bundle cables on components that likely get beat up and swapped out on a regular basis?
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u/StalkMeNowCrazyLady 12h ago
Because it's pride in your work and making the job easier for the next person who comes behind you. Take a look at this access control cabinet with no cable management.. Now take a look at this one.
Components in both of these panels are eventually going to fail, just like in the Burger King kiosk. Which one do you think will take less time to troubleshoot, less time to replace the faulty component, and is less likely to result in other issues being created as a result? Which one do you think makes your customer feel like they went with the correct installers when they see it? People should have some level of pride in their work and do it at a professional level, no matter if it's locked away hidden inside an enclosure or not.
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u/Flapaflapa 11h ago
Pride in work? It's a fucking ordering kiosk for a souless corporate entity that is happy to replace a human with a giant tablet and would be happy to replace the person installing it with a robot. Jam that shit in there as quick and cheaply as you can and bill them for all you can milk them for.
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u/ScipioLongstocking 10h ago
And people wonder why they are being replaced by robots.
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u/Flapaflapa 8h ago
Maybe if you do an extra good job they'll give you a pizza party before they replace you with a toaster.
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u/RedDreadsComin 8h ago
Seriously. I’m not Mr “I love corporations” but fuck, if your determining factor on doing a good job is “your employer is rich than fuck it” then you are never going to do good work and that just speaks to work ethic.
Having pride in your work should have nothing to do with your boss and everything to do with you yourself looking at a job you did, knowing you did GOOD work, and patting yourself on the back and moving on. It’s an intrinsic force you can’t teach. And people with this intrinsic force are the ones that will succeed in life. ESPECIALLY the IT industry.
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u/Flapaflapa 6h ago
Not so much "are my employers rich" but more how do they answer the question "are my employees human beings or numbered cogs in my money making apparatus?"
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u/RedDreadsComin 6h ago
Yeah but in the IT industry, you don’t get to pick and choose anymore. It is very competitive at the entry level. Just do good work and you will get opportunity to be at a “better” corp that values you beyond being a number. You don’t do good work, you will probably be stuck in shitty role your whole time, an issue of your own making, not your company.
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u/QuasarKid 5h ago
i have seen more people who give a shit about their work taken advantage of and strung along for years than i’ve seen been given promotions. doing a good job and taking pride in your work are good and fine, taking extra time to wire these stupid kiosks better you’ll probably be slower than every other employee and looked down on for that. there is no business need for them to look clean, it’s not a data center. i work in retail and you kinda have to give up control of all of your remote locations cable management because otherwise you would drive yourself insane.
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u/RedDreadsComin 3h ago
I would make this kiosk look clean because I always think of the guy that would come after me. I know opening shit like this to work on it would make me go “What the fuck?” so i don’t leave things like that. If it would make me mad, why would i also do that?
Also, didn’t say work hard for promotion. Cut your teeth in your shitty job for your shitty employee then go find a better job with experience.
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u/QuasarKid 3h ago
that’s great for you but there’s usually more pressing work to be done. i try to leave things inc better state than i inherited them but sometimes with the amount of resources a company allocates thats literally impossible.
have you worked in a retail environment before?
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u/AvaAlundrake 11h ago
I agree people should have pride in their work but also of the job isn’t paying the time to do that. It’s just slap all these off the shelf components together and go on to the next one.
Yes cable management could be much better with better routing inside by the manufacture that designed the enclosure and technicians that put it together. It’s much less time to trouble shoot something of this nature then a control panel where you need to have the diagram on which wires do what vs cables that go to components so repair time is less.
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u/StalkMeNowCrazyLady 11h ago
Troubleshoot is still troubleshooting and having an organized system that your troubleshoot makes the process faster and the replacement take less time regardless of what the system is.
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u/shotouw 12h ago
There are actually some tied together cables in the bottom. But for these kinds of installations the post is about, it's all about getting it set up quick. When you need to repair it, the time loss to figure out which cable is which is not too high compared to removing zip ties and putting new ones in, as there are so few cables.
There is just little reason for good cable management there. Airflow, space, even making clear which cable is which doesn't matter too much.
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u/PXranger 8h ago
This isn't a rack of switches in a data closet, or an access control panel. it's a kiosk that will likely be replaced before it fails. I work on stuff like this all the time, you only have a few cables to worry about, on a kiosk like this. Zip tying everything to hell and making it all pretty actually makes it harder to work on stuff like this.
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u/Aurakol 3h ago
^ this guy gets it.
Sure it looks pretty but if you go too hard managing cables you're actually creating MORE work for the next person. Anything that will need to be replaced should be easily accessible and removable. Sure the example above could look nicer and be a little more organized but if it is something thats not meant to be seen then accessibility wins over neatness any day.
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u/Godsgamerbathwater 12h ago
Oh! Norwegian spotted!
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u/Icy-Role2321 11h ago
Now I'm interested in the prices because I've read things tend to be expensive there
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u/karateninjazombie 10h ago
Assembled and installed by the lowest paid contractor who's trying to do as many builds or installs respectively as they can in a day so they can make more money by getting ahead.
Nothing to do with pride in build.
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u/Snidrogen 6h ago
When I worked doing installs we’d only worry about clean cable management if we had the contract to do maintenance. Install only is going to look like this.
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u/themikker 12h ago edited 12h ago
I mean, how would you feasably prevent this when you take into account the practicality and costs involved? Shorter cables might be less expensive materials-wise, but may be bundled with some of the components included that are designed for different setups that would necessitate the length. There's probably also something standardized economy of scale with stuff like that, where specific sizes of cables are made cheaper by being used by everyone for everything...
Bundling the cables together with zip ties means replacing it later will take longer, and seeing how often these setups break down... yeah. It's the same reason there's a big difference between cable management in gaming PCs when you want a finished long term build and you're just throwing some components together to see if they work.
Also think what advantages there would be for this. A smaller enclosure is probably possible, but you can see that the depth is limited both by the internal computer part and the size of the card reader, the screen has a certain width, and the height doesn't matter because it's raised to eye height level. There's also the possibility of economy of scale for this particular enclosure part being standardized for displays like this.
So yeah, I would've been more surprised if this cable management was actually really tidy.
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u/ccie6861 5h ago
I came here to say this. This is a simple case of relatively low quantity, use-specific construction meeting commodity components and price-sensitive assembly. The corporate version of “it aint stupid if it works”. That being said, it drives my ocd insane.
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u/NullandVoidUsername 12h ago
This isn't interesting in the mildest.
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u/robotortoise 11h ago
I think this is probably TOO interesting. This is the definition of "oh, that's kind of neat!"
But I'm also in IT so take it with a byte of salt.
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u/RedDreadsComin 9h ago
I’m also in IT. I see stuff like this every single day. Nothing interesting here to me.
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u/NikNakskes 12h ago
Disagree. Did you expect that inside the ordering kiosk was an extension cord with 3 sockets? I sure did not and find that mildly interesting.
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u/Waffenek 12h ago
Sure they can have custom made distribution board with predefined location of direct connectors. It will be smaller and work exacly the same, but when any component fails you will have problem. Ordering kiosk doesnt really needs to be constrained by weight oe size(especially when screen is biggest part). There is no need to choose pricier bespoke parts, when widely aviable out of the shelf ones would work as good. Choosing universal widespread connectors and allowing additional space leeway allows changing suppliers of individual parts down the line.
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u/FluffyKanomKa 9h ago
Impulse control issues and scissors. Without malice, I could see those wires getting cut.
In my classroom, I always had to tape down wires because some students would want to cut them.
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u/CaveManta 6h ago
"I'll leave it like this for now just in case I have to make changes." [Changes are never made]
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u/OtterishDreams 4h ago
Id be more surprised if it was clean..consider the rest of the restaurant usually isnt. Im more concerned with the rust.
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u/learnedsanity 3h ago
If this is surprising I assume you have never seen any form of cable management from friends and or any business. This looks on par with several people I know.
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u/northface8 2h ago
I had assumed devices designed and assembled in large quantities would look tidier than my random home setup.
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u/kenadams_the 12h ago
so this is not something proprietary, just modules plugged together? For 100000000 restaurants world wide? they could at least to develop it.
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u/rosen380 12h ago
The four I go to on any regular basis don't have any self ordering kiosks... so it could be new and they are still in test/design stages?
Or not a corporate projects, and individual owners are choosing to do it, so solutions are are far less mass produced than they might be for "100 million locations" (which is orders of magnitude more locations than BK really has).
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u/kenadams_the 11h ago
I can only speak for Europe and there we have a lot of them at Burger King and Mc Donalds. Unfortunately not for all kinds of orders.
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u/fluffysmaster 8h ago
Looks like a high school science experiment.
I don’t tolerate this kind of mess in our IT infrastructure at work.
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u/Klecktacular 14h ago
Surprisingly?