Yup
check the fuse(s) first
read the owner and/or operator manual . . . find out how something is supposed to work. Maybe what the customer is complaining about is in fact normal operation. Boy, that was simple, wasn’t it?
I could go on and on . . .
I’m beginning to think you just make these ridiculous comments to get attention . . .
I became interested in solving automobile problems when I was in junior high school and would read “Tales From.The Model Garage” which appeared in each monthly issue of Popular Science. The proprietor of the Model Garage, Gus Wilson, would solve some tricky auto problem that other mechanics couldn’t solve. I mowed the grass around a shop and would talk to the mechanic who owned the business. He would tell me about a car he had repaired that had some strange problem and then ask me what I thought he had to do to fix it.
A lot of what I learned about diagnosing a car problem helped me find problems in çomputer programs my students wrote for their assignments. If the program wouldn’t compile (translate from the higher level language to the machine language), it’s like a car that won’t turn over. The likely problem with the car is a dead battery. The problem with the program is a syntax error. This is easy to find. The second type of problem is a program that compiles but won’t execute. This is like a car that turns over but won’t start. In the case of the car, it isn’t getting ignition or it isn’t getting fuel. A mechanic traces down which it is. In a computer program it isn’t too difficult to figure out what caused the program not to run. The most difficult case is a program that runs, but the results are incorrect. This is like a car that runs, but doesn’t run as it should. I had an attractive female student that came to see me about 4:15. She had written the program, but the results weren’t right. I had an evening class that went from 4:30 to 6:00 p.m followed by another class that went from 6:30 to 9:00. I told the student to leave a copy of her program and I would look at it later in the evening. One of our graduate students overheard the conversation and he volunteered to fix the program. The student and I left the office together. When I returned to the office, the graduate student was replacing every line of code and still couldn’t find the problem. He was working like a mechanic who changes parts until he finally gets the car to run.right. I looked at the program and said, “Use your head. It has to be in one of the variables”. I spotted the error in less than five minutes. In one variable name, the student had typed a zero (0) instead of an O in the middle of the variable name.
I probably learned as much about problem solving reading “Tales From The Model Garage” and talking to mechanics as I did in my mathematics and other science courses.
I’m not a mechanic, but I was successful in the TV field I worked in for 40 years mainly for one reason — an apprenticeship.
I learned a lot from books in school, but then worked for a year at a station during my senior year as an intern (the 1970s word for what my Dad knew as an apprentice) 25 hours a week and if I hadn’t done that I would have known nothing when I got my first job.
The station manager said to me one day, hell your school taught you well. I told him, truth is if I hadn’t done that apprenticeship with a real TV station for 8 months, I would have known nothing, or worse, thought I knew when I really didn’t.