The Fault That Wasn't a Fault

Had a call Tuesday at one of the hospital towers downtown, a car throwing a door lock fault every third or fourth run, nothing consistent about it, which is the worst kind of fault to get called on because consistent is easy. Consistent means something’s actually broken. Intermittent means you’re going to spend four hours proving a negative, checking the interlock switch, checking the encoder, checking the wiring harness for a chafe point that isn’t there, and eventually finding out the sensor itself has a batch defect that only shows up when the car’s been running warm for a while. That’s an afternoon of my life I’m not getting back, and the fix, once I finally tracked it down in a service bulletin from two years ago that nobody at the shop had flagged, took about eleven minutes.

I came home and sat down with the Mage Knight rulebook trying to figure out whether attack can pool the way block can, which it can’t, and I caught myself doing the exact same thing I’d just spent all day doing at work, assuming the problem was somewhere obvious and burning time ruling things out before I found the actual answer buried in a FAQ thread instead of the book itself. My wife Renae has pointed out more than once that I bring the shop home with me whether I mean to or not, and she’s not wrong. A binder of service bulletins and a rulebook with a bad index are basically the same document if you squint.

What actually gets me about the job, and I don’t think I’ve said this plainly anywhere else on here, is how much of it is just deciding whether to trust the machine’s own diagnosis of itself. The panel tells you what it thinks is wrong, and half the time it’s right, and the other half it’s a sensor reporting a story that isn’t true, and you have to know the difference before you start swapping parts. I’ve gotten pretty good at that instinct after eight years, good enough that I now do it reflexively to things that have nothing to do with elevators, a board game rulebook, an argument with my kid about whether she actually finished her homework, whatever’s in front of me that’s telling me a story I’m not sure I believe yet.

The eleven minute fix, once I found it, was almost insulting in how simple it was, a firmware flag that needed resetting, no parts involved at all. I keep meaning to write up my own version of that bulletin so the next guy at the shop doesn’t burn a Tuesday afternoon the same way I did, and I keep not doing it, which is its own kind of problem I probably shouldn’t examine too closely on a hobby blog about board games.