megloff11x
Senior Member
Troubleshooting can be a black art. Being shorter of memory in middle age, I resort to documenting past incidents, and if I can remember that I've seen something like this before, I go through my notes.
Many problems are straightfoward (it's unplugged), but some are very confusing, with many layers of the onion to peel away to solve.
I'm wondering if we shouldn't have a place to post problems encountered, how you solved the mystery, how you would have gotten to the truth sooner were it not for..., and how to prevent.
My own observations on such issues are:
1. The wilder ones are often solved fastest by the neophytes, who are not carrying the baggage of preconceived notions that come with experience.
2. Too often new guys with little expertise get the "John Wayne Swimming Lesson" (throw the boy into the pond so he can swim or drown to make a man of him) on an important problem. This is discouraging and self-confidence crushing when a more senior colleague has to bail him out when he fails as expected.
3. How "zero tolerance for mistakes" leads to cover ups and misleading information that delays the resolution. If you run a restaurant, you'd best tolerate a dropped burger now and then or your people will be scooping them up and serving them to your customers, until the health inspector catches on and you get fined and lose those customers. Better to lose half a spool of romex or some fittings than have your apprentice hide a bad job and the building burns down.
4. You need to be totally honest, and going back to #3, you need to be able to fail once in a while without fear of demotion, termination, etc., even if it's a bad failure. You may have been embarassingly wrong, but the mistake will be repeated if covered up and buried. This is not to say that a perpetual screw up shouldn't find a new career. A good boss gives his subordinates a chance to fail in smaller ways, but doesn't let them cause a train wreck.
5. Some problems are best solved by methodical flow charts or check lists. Others require creative thinking "out of the box." Others require a group effort.
6. And further back to #3, folks often omit or gloss over details that they judge unimportant, but are actually critical. You need to ask the right questions to determine this if you didn't see it happen or do all the tests yourself.
7. No matter how good and knowledgeable you are, you will get stumped or do the wrong thing at some point.
Consider the apocryphal story of how vapor lock was discovered. A man claimed that when he went to get Vanilla Ice cream on a hot day, his car would have trouble re-starting, while if he got an esoteric flavor, it was fine. The symptom (ice cream flavor starting dependance) masked the real symptom (extra time needed to get an uncommon flavor from the back room) and the root cause (time for condition to go away).
A well sorted and indexed book of short case studies would be an invaluable reference. Throw in a few chapters on when and why your measuring instruments will lie to you, and it would sell better and certainly be more useful than most references.
Matt
Many problems are straightfoward (it's unplugged), but some are very confusing, with many layers of the onion to peel away to solve.
I'm wondering if we shouldn't have a place to post problems encountered, how you solved the mystery, how you would have gotten to the truth sooner were it not for..., and how to prevent.
My own observations on such issues are:
1. The wilder ones are often solved fastest by the neophytes, who are not carrying the baggage of preconceived notions that come with experience.
2. Too often new guys with little expertise get the "John Wayne Swimming Lesson" (throw the boy into the pond so he can swim or drown to make a man of him) on an important problem. This is discouraging and self-confidence crushing when a more senior colleague has to bail him out when he fails as expected.
3. How "zero tolerance for mistakes" leads to cover ups and misleading information that delays the resolution. If you run a restaurant, you'd best tolerate a dropped burger now and then or your people will be scooping them up and serving them to your customers, until the health inspector catches on and you get fined and lose those customers. Better to lose half a spool of romex or some fittings than have your apprentice hide a bad job and the building burns down.
4. You need to be totally honest, and going back to #3, you need to be able to fail once in a while without fear of demotion, termination, etc., even if it's a bad failure. You may have been embarassingly wrong, but the mistake will be repeated if covered up and buried. This is not to say that a perpetual screw up shouldn't find a new career. A good boss gives his subordinates a chance to fail in smaller ways, but doesn't let them cause a train wreck.
5. Some problems are best solved by methodical flow charts or check lists. Others require creative thinking "out of the box." Others require a group effort.
6. And further back to #3, folks often omit or gloss over details that they judge unimportant, but are actually critical. You need to ask the right questions to determine this if you didn't see it happen or do all the tests yourself.
7. No matter how good and knowledgeable you are, you will get stumped or do the wrong thing at some point.
Consider the apocryphal story of how vapor lock was discovered. A man claimed that when he went to get Vanilla Ice cream on a hot day, his car would have trouble re-starting, while if he got an esoteric flavor, it was fine. The symptom (ice cream flavor starting dependance) masked the real symptom (extra time needed to get an uncommon flavor from the back room) and the root cause (time for condition to go away).
A well sorted and indexed book of short case studies would be an invaluable reference. Throw in a few chapters on when and why your measuring instruments will lie to you, and it would sell better and certainly be more useful than most references.
Matt
