Hot take: I was wrong about the 'always check the cannon plug first' advice

For years, my lead at the MRO in Tulsa would say, 'It's always the cannon plug, kid.' I was chasing a comms fault on a Citation last month, a real head scratcher with intermittent audio dropouts. I spent half a day pulling and inspecting every D-sub in the audio panel path because of that advice, cleaning pins that looked fine. The actual fault was a corroded ground stud behind the main instrument panel, a spot I didn't even look at until I was forced to start over. That single piece of well-meaning but absolute advice cost me a bunch of time. It made me lazy, you know? I just defaulted to it instead of following the manual's isolation steps from the start. Has anyone else had a piece of shop 'wisdom' bite them like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

blairj551mo ago

Doubt it's that deep. Sometimes the old heads are right, sometimes they're wrong, you just got unlucky.

the_cora1mo ago

Read a story once about a guy who spent a week swapping out a flight control computer on a regional jet for a trim issue. The whole shop swore it was the classic failure mode for that plane. Turned out a bird's nest had jammed the actual trim screw jack in the tail. Those old sayings become shortcuts, and shortcuts make you blind to the simple stuff. Your story about the ground stud hits that same nerve. It feels like we trust the old heads more than the book sometimes, even when the book is literally the written path to follow. How do you break that habit once you see it happen?

kelly.daniel15d ago

Yeah, it's like that everywhere. You see it with people who always buy the same brand because "it's the best," then miss a better deal right next to it. Or following a driving route you know is slow because it's the way you've always gone. That mental shortcut just shuts down the part of your brain that stops to look. The manual, or the map, becomes background noise to the habit. Breaking it means forcing yourself to stop and physically check the steps, even when you're sure you know the answer. It feels dumb, but it's the only way to see past the routine.