The Callout · a true story

The One Rule I Preach, and the Time I Broke It

Every story on this site preaches the same thing: verify it yourself. Here's the honest one — the callout where I didn't, and it cost four hours. Trust but verify applies to the expert too.

A real callout · written by a working maintenance professional

A system had been down for hours after a power outage. I got called right at the start of shift. By the time I arrived, a lot of work had already been done — hands all over it, things moved, things reconnected. So I did the right thing and started from scratch, working it clean rather than trusting whatever state it had been left in.

Mostly clean, anyway. Because I made one exception, and it's the whole story.

The question I asked, and the answer I took

Early on I asked whether all the communication cables to the PLC rack were back in the right places. After a power event and a lot of hands, cables getting swapped between ports is exactly the kind of dumb, invisible problem that eats a day. So I asked.

“Yep, all good.”

And I took their word for it. I moved on and started chasing everything else — the deeper, more interesting possibilities — while that one basic assumption sat there, unverified, holding up the whole diagnosis.

Four hours later

The comm cables were not in the right places. After four hours of troubleshooting, that's where it ended: a couple of connections in the wrong slots, exactly the thing I'd asked about and chosen to believe instead of check. They hadn't verified their work. And here's the honest part — neither had I.

The rule, including for the expert

I tell people to verify it themselves and not take the room's word for it. This is the callout where I broke my own rule, and it cost four hours to relearn it. After a power event especially, physically verify the basics first — are the cables even in the right slots, are the obvious things actually where they should be — before you go chasing anything clever.

Trust but verify isn't a rule for other people's work. It's a rule for the assumption you're most tempted to wave through — and sometimes that assumption is your own.

Reading about it is one thing. Doing it under pressure is another.

faultline101 drops you into faults where the cheap, basic check you skipped is the one that mattered — and the readings respond to your choices, exactly like a real callout. You build the habit of verifying the basics before chasing the clever stuff, on equipment you can't break. Module 1 is free, no card required.

Works with no signal. Install it on your phone and the whole course — 35 modules, 210 faults — comes with you into the plant.

Try the trainer free

This is one of a set of real callouts I collected — the wins and the humbling ones both. They ended up drawn as a comic, because they're funnier on paper than they were to live through: Tales of a Troubleshooter, eighteen true rescues where the fault is never the thing the crew swore it was.