I trouble shoot and repair data/telephone systems and AV stuff for a living.......... whenever I arrive on site and listen to their tale of woe I always look for the human problem first and then the equipment that usually gives 5 9's reliability.
When I'm working on something myself I suspect myself as the culprit until I can prove otherwise LOL
"It hasn't worked since we had our air conditioning fixed"
When did you notice the problem? "oh it's never worked since I've been working here"
"The copier never works in the morning after we have coffee"
And on and on....... seems few things break compared to amount of items that are screwed up by humans on a daily basis. We are our worst enemies
I spent some time trying to work out exactly what to quote and then decided that your whole post was "rolled gold".
Vocationally I started out as an electrician, segued into computers, initially as a field engineer for the once great company NCR. I've ended up at the back end of my vocational life as a lawyer, but that is another story.
In the early 1970s, a local timber products company installed the then latest and greatest NCR mini to handle stock control, inventory, wages and accounting. Its installation was a major event and there was even local newspaper coverage.
Problem was that starting about three weeks after installation, at precisely 8:45 every morning, it crashed. Firmly believing that it was an electrical/electronic problem I cataloged every piece of electrical machinery onsite - ranging from little to massive saws, kilns, steam boilers, conveyor belting etc. etc.
I could not find anything that was being switched at precisely 8:45, and in fact given the protection on the supply line I could not understand how anything external could affect the computer anyway.
After two weeks I was at near despair, the customer was unhappy, my boss was unhappy and I was very unhappy. Worse on some days when I actually had equipment set up to monitor the supply line and sat in the computer room waiting for it to crash - it didn't.
On this day I was sitting in the computer room doing two things, firstly contemplating a new career somewhere a long way away and secondly contemplating the exquisite beauty of the girl who was employed as the "punchy" to enter the data.
Sitting quietly in the corner as I was, she had quite forgotten I was there. At precisely 8:45 the secretary to the boss of the place (who was also very "comely" came into the room with two cups of coffee, went to the "punchy" and engaged her in a passionate embrace and a lingering kiss - during which time the computer crashed.
Now the early 1970s were a less tolerant time and I was very young, so you can imagine my difficulties, firstly in explaining to the two young ladies that passionate embraces whilst wearing (I think) Lycra underwear and computers do not mix, and secondly in finding reasons satisfactory to the customer and my boss to account for both the recurrent crashes and their sudden resolution without giving up the two girls, who in the very brief time that the "punchy" had been there had formed a "relationship of personal intimacy".
The lasting memory (remember I was very young) was that too such really hot girls were gay and therefore off the market.....
In any event, once the means of generating a large static potential was dealt with there were no further problems.
