A Study in the Male Ego
Posted: January 22nd, 2007, 7:21 pm
I have this friend, named Al.
Al recently rewired a boat trailer. Well he ran into a little problem with the right rear light. Thinking he inadvertently switched the brown and yellow wires when he hooked the light up to the harness, he decided to fix it later.
To Al's credit he decided to not put things together permanently until everything was working correctly.
When Al got back on the project he discovered that he had put everything together correctly, but the right rear light was not working properly and didn't work at all with the car headlights on. The left rear worked like a champ. So Al takes both lights apart, does a lot of head scratching, can't figure it out, thinks it might be a problem with the car, but no, the lights on the utility trailer work fine, hooked up to the same car. All he can figure, a couple hours and a lot of frustration later, is he got a bum light.
So rather than ask his friends and admit he was stumped, Al asked a new aquaintance after discovering that the new friend does this kind of work for a living for the federal government, fixing things federal wildlife officers break.
Upon hearing what the problem was, with the trailer 25 miles away, the new friend immediately said, "Take the plastic license plate bracket off the light mount. The light is not properly grounded and the master ground isn't going to do it."
So Al did just that the very next morning, and now the trailer lights work just peachy.
And if Al had just presented the problem to his circle of friends, several of whom could have likely solved the problem as easily as the new friend, it wouldn't have made anywhere near as good a story.
Al recently rewired a boat trailer. Well he ran into a little problem with the right rear light. Thinking he inadvertently switched the brown and yellow wires when he hooked the light up to the harness, he decided to fix it later.
To Al's credit he decided to not put things together permanently until everything was working correctly.
When Al got back on the project he discovered that he had put everything together correctly, but the right rear light was not working properly and didn't work at all with the car headlights on. The left rear worked like a champ. So Al takes both lights apart, does a lot of head scratching, can't figure it out, thinks it might be a problem with the car, but no, the lights on the utility trailer work fine, hooked up to the same car. All he can figure, a couple hours and a lot of frustration later, is he got a bum light.
So rather than ask his friends and admit he was stumped, Al asked a new aquaintance after discovering that the new friend does this kind of work for a living for the federal government, fixing things federal wildlife officers break.
Upon hearing what the problem was, with the trailer 25 miles away, the new friend immediately said, "Take the plastic license plate bracket off the light mount. The light is not properly grounded and the master ground isn't going to do it."
So Al did just that the very next morning, and now the trailer lights work just peachy.
And if Al had just presented the problem to his circle of friends, several of whom could have likely solved the problem as easily as the new friend, it wouldn't have made anywhere near as good a story.
