Try ‘and I also wash dishes.’
Now these are helpful hints.
Off to edit my dating profile.
Our central A/C had suddenly quit cooling.
We’d been getting the “gonna die ANY DAY NOW” from the place we have our service contract - for 2+ years. I’d actually gotten several bids the previous year but never followed through on them; this made it a titch more urgent.
So I called one of the places, said “Well, we have had you out to do bids before, but this time imma sign on the spot”.
He came out, started writing up the bid, and looked at the unit and pushed one button - which caused it to start instantly.
Turns out, my husband had been doing some work down there - cleaning out a duct or something - and somehow managed to push this button by mistake.
We got the new unit anyway - because the old one was nearing its end of life and we got an end-of-season discount (this was September a year back).
Done the ignition key / jiggle the steering wheel thing myself; my son got stymied by it a couple months ago.
I have not mixed up the car keys - but my husband once did, when he had a rental car (same make, different model from ours). He was FURIOUS - until he figured out what he was doing.
We learned the hard way about the disposal reset switch and the hex wrench :
:
Learn where the car’s fuse box is and know how to swap out the fuses - all, if need be. We found that suddenly the cigarette-lighter plug did not work on my car - I used it for phone charging. I tried the fuses but the manual was actually misleading as to which one controlled the lighter. IIRC, they laughed at me and did not charge me. Also recognize that the little fuse-puller doohickey that often comes with a box of replacement fuses usually will not work - we had to get out a pair of needlenose pliers, as the damn thing is about as hard to reach as they could make it. The issue turned out to be a faulty charger, that was rated for a lot less than the fuse should have been able to manage, but I guess it spiked when connected, as the thing killed the next fuse instantly as well.
This is something that I learned the hard way last month, so I’ll share this so you save yourself a service call:
I had my internet flake out on me a few days after painting the living room, and correctly guessed that I caused the problem by moving furniture. What I didn’t figure out without a service call, however, is the internet has an electrical wall plugin in the basement. Sigh. It had just come lose from the outlet. Oops.
The technician was not impressed with me.
Check the circuit breaker. If you call a technician and they tell you to check the breaker, do it. Even if the thing you are troubleshooting HAS power. Don’t just assume they are reading off a checklist and don’t know what they are talking about.
When I was working, one of my career responsibilities involved troubleshooting problems with large complex lighting automation systems. Frequently, I would get a call from someone and the problem was that a light or group of lights would not turn OFF. I would tell them to check all their circuit breakers.
They usually didn’t because they didn’t understand why I told them that - no matter how much I explained it.
Some of the systems had power components with a digital communication link. The communication path went through the electrical components. It was a lousy design. If an electrical component lost power, the comms wouldn’t pass through it and it would kill communication to everything downstream. This caused the status to freeze, if lights were on they would be stuck on.
I had seen this hundreds of times. The solution is to restore power to the component that was blocking the comms. And I made dozens of service calls where I walked in the door, reset the problem breaker (or referred them to a licensed electrician to replace the breaker or fix a short) and left. And I always played the nice guy and cut my $350 service fee in half.
And the hapless customer would apologize and explain again that he didn’t understand how a tripped breaker could keep his lights from turning off.
You are a saint. While I generally try to play nice guy, if my instructions are ignored completely and I have to exert myself unnecessarily, it is damn sure going to be full price 
Well, my kids certainly don’t, and when they do, it’s so poorly I end up rewashing them anyway… On the profile it goes!
I know, right? Glad I didn’t consult a pro first! (I am going to pretend there isn’t such a thing… But I am sure there probably is…)
DMX makes sense, except when it doesn’t. Or when “Joe” was messing with things and managed to knock a conference room into another universe.
You’ll appreciate this one, then.
On one very badly managed DMX project, the contractor decided to homerun each control location (50 or so, IIRC) to the electrical room instead of daisy-chaining point to point. He thought it was safer. The mistake wasn’t discovered until construction was complete.
I seldom gloated about my competitor’s screw-ups, but this one felt good. I was the other bidder on this project and I was undercut by someone that managed to underbid me by “cutting out the middleman”.- enabled by a too smart for his own good rich guy owner that thought he was an ace negotiator.
The problem in this case was that the “middleman“ was the person responsible for Issuing drawings and managing the installation.
You will realize what an epic mistake this was and while I don’t know what it took to straighten it out, I know the fix cost more than the total original cost of the system.
Yikes… If they didn’t change the controllers to have fifty universes, I can only imagine a lot of fishing new control cable between fixtures. Wire is cheap, but the labor…ouch! And let me guess…they also probably used mic cable? 
{ wanders in }
{ sees words in English }
{ is unable to link words into anything coherent }
I understand “wire is cheap / labor is expensive.” That part, I get.
The rest … something about daisies? But not in a gardening context.
Actually it kinda is, because daisy chaining as a wiring term comes from doing this to literal daisies.
Note: do not use Bing to search for daisy chain at work unless you’ve got SafeSearch: strict on! wow.