Start at the Wall!

 

Some things are so obvious, they should be automatic. Like this one: When a piece of equipment won’t turn on, start at the wall.

One of the experiments my team worked on required three pieces of equipment. We built the first rough prototypes and, after we got each piece running OK, we scheduled the first test of the whole system. 


We set the whole thing up – all the cables it looked like a pile of yarn the cat tore up. kind of like behind your TV or computer. 


Remember, there are three engineers standing around the rack; that’s important to the story.


One of us turned on the power strip and two pieces hummed to life. A green power light and lots of flashing lights. One unit just sat there, mocking us quietly. 


We scrambled into action. We moved the rack away from the wall and checked all the cables that connected the system; everything looked good. We checked the wiring in the misbehaving piece, A-OK.

Unfortunately, none of us looked down to the power strip. Finally, a team member glanced down and saw the problem: the silent unit wasn’t plugged in. We all laughed in embarrassment and plugged it in – Wallah! It worked!