What do facilities with haphazard wiring have in common?

I sent the below message to a coworker and now I'm retrospectively auditing my thoughts, assumptions, biases, etc. (second guessing myself). I'm curious if my experiences match others. If you're not afraid to, please fill in the blank. You can PM me your answer if you don't want it to be public. I do not wish to ignite any social/political/race debates, just to validate/invalidate the assertion that I have already made.



"As a field service tech I worked in different facilities every day, sometimes many in a day, hundreds of facilities over the years. One of my observations is that a disproportionately high percentage of [__________] people are not even a little bit afraid to tamper with machinery that they don't understand. This is data, not racism. Plants staffed primarily with [__________] people more often have control cabinets full of unsanctioned, undocumented, and absolutely perilous haphazard wiring changes. I've watched with my own eyes as [__________] guys go into a panel and just start randomly lifting wires off of relays and landing them on other relays, with absolute conviction and total confidence. The untrained observer would never think to question their knowledge. This must just be "how it's done" in [__________]; a cultural thing. I don't mean to sound ugly; I know they mean well, but this cannot be allowed to happen at our facility. Plants where these practices are allowed to cultivate, are plants where people get hurt or killed, and where the equipment is down more than up."

OK, I'll bite.

"As a field service tech I worked in different facilities every day, sometimes many in a day, hundreds of facilities over the years. One of my observations is that a disproportionately high percentage of male people are not even a little bit afraid to tamper with machinery that they don't understand. This is data, not racism. Plants staffed primarily with male people more often have control cabinets full of unsanctioned, undocumented, and absolutely perilous haphazard wiring changes. I've watched with my own eyes as male guys go into a panel and just start randomly lifting wires off of relays and landing them on other relays, with absolute conviction and total confidence. The untrained observer would never think to question their knowledge. This must just be "how it's done" in manistan; a cultural thing. I don't mean to sound ugly; I know they mean well, but this cannot be allowed to happen at our facility. Plants where these practices are allowed to cultivate, are plants where people get hurt or killed, and where the equipment is down more than up."

Steve Bailey said:

OK, I'll bite.

Click to expand...

Im going with "maintenance"

What the hell is happening to this forum?

rupej said:

What the hell is happening to this forum?

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I find myself typing up responses and then saying f it and deleting it a lot lately.

This thread was actually one of them.

I'm trying to give the thread the seriousness it deserves, so as a salute to the OP;

"As a field service tech I worked in different facilities in Texas every day, sometimes many in a day, hundreds of facilities over the years. One of my observations is that a disproportionately high percentage of Texans are not even a little bit afraid to tamper with machinery that they don't understand. This is data, not racism. Plants staffed primarily with Texans more often have control cabinets full of unsanctioned, undocumented, and absolutely perilous haphazard wiring changes. I've watched with my own eyes as Texans go into a panel and just start randomly lifting wires off of relays and landing them on other relays, with absolute conviction and total confidence. The untrained observer would never think to question their knowledge. This must just be "how it's done" in Texas ; a cultural thing. I don't mean to sound ugly; I know they mean well, but this cannot be allowed to happen at our facility. Plants where these practices are allowed to cultivate, are plants where people get hurt or killed, and where the equipment is down more than up."

Perfectly OK to substitute "Massachusetts" and "Ma$$holes" if you want.

rupej said:

What the hell is happening to this forum?

Click to expand...

Trying to lighten it up a little... people are to damn up tight

Pretty sure the OP isn't intending this to be funny

geniusintraining said:

Trying to lighten it up a little... people are to damn up tight

Click to expand...

Pandemic brain.

Not "male", "Texans" or the like, not even "maintenance" (as I have seen a lot of operators and supervisors reaching in live 480 and 600V panels)

from my perspective I can say "Earthlings"

Ok so maybe my experiences are unique, or clouded with bias. Thank you for the responses.

I think it is a matter of perspective and personal prejudices.



A maintenance tech that thinks women have no place around his machines will see everything she does (in his mind) wrong, but male workers doing the same exact thing don't trigger any response.


You can replace 'women' and 'male' with whatever occupation, nationality, hair color, height, age, race, religion or species you want and the statement stands.

Not quite on this theme but some years ago my boss & I went to look at a retrofit of controls on a machine, the controls had been done in-house and was loads of plastic clear lid terminal type boxes with no cable containment, my boss commented that it was like commune of rats nests. We produced a costing for the retrofit and my boss sent it off, the MD politely replied & said I do not think you will be getting the job. I found out later that My boss who would never hold back on his words put in the quote that it was a rats nest, would not consider a phased install as it was so dangerous. thought we heard the last of it. But a few months later we received a phone call asking us to completely re-do it in a time scale of 3 weeks, it turned out a guy was killed by electrocution just by touching the frame of the machine (one hand on one part & other on another considered as separate parts). The company had been shut down until it was sorted by the HSE. In our case, his chosen words worked well for us as we did all the other machines as well. but sometimes it pays to choose your words carefully.

"As a field service tech I worked in different facilities every day, sometimes many in a day, hundreds of facilities over the years. One of my observations is that a disproportionately high percentage of incompetent people are not even a little bit afraid to tamper with machinery that they don't understand. This is data, not racism. Plants staffed primarily with irresponsible people more often have control cabinets full of unsanctioned, undocumented, and absolutely perilous haphazard wiring changes. I've watched with my own eyes as incompetent guys go into a panel and just start randomly lifting wires off of relays and landing them on other relays, with absolute conviction and total confidence. The untrained observer would never think to question their knowledge. This must just be "how it's done" in the wild west; a cultural thing. I don't mean to sound ugly; I know they mean well, but this cannot be allowed to happen at our facility. Plants where these practices are allowed to cultivate, are plants where people get hurt or killed, and where the equipment is down more than up."


That's my take on it.

As someone that is now working in a similar place in charge of putting everything back to as it should be, I can see some of the roots on how it all started.

You get people put in charge of projects that are removed from the plant personnel... to the point they don't even need to ask permission of the responsible person to do changes.

Then, because it costs money to have competent people in all fields, you go without and let incompetent people take over the electrical/instrumentation part even though they are in fact chemists that understand electricity at an electron level only... they make mistakes in their scoping (like thinking including an IS barrier magically makes a loop intrinsically safe) and don't want to listen when the contractors tell them it's not right (or the contractors are even more incompentent or simply don't care).

Then, the people in the plant see that the company installed something poorly and to a low standard and they assume that's fine and lower theirs...

Sprinkle in a few incompetent people whose job is to ensure that things need to be done right and more importantly documented for about 10 years and it ends up in a **** show of epic proportions.
The last one I had to deal with was the predecessor thinking it was ok not to meet BS7671 on the protections of a ring across the site because he wouldn't need to open the ring regularly... luckily I made a joke about a typo in a drawing and was told that it wasn't a typo and the previous "responsible" was fine to make such installation and the subcontractor in charge would not issue a circuit certificate as it was clearly unsafe.

To be honest, you could fill the blanks with anything... long haired people, bald people, ugly people, fat, skinney, bubba, hell anything because they all fit and they all dont fit.

I have worked from California to South Carolina and everywhere in the middle and your going to find people that take pride in their work and people that just dont give a damn in every fashion and every state, most of the people that dont care are what I call "short timers"... these are people that are on their way out or could never hold a job for longer than a year also lazy and never thought about the next person that was going to open the cabinet door and say "What the #$^#" or "Hey I can work on this"

So if I were looking at this I would use "short timer" before I said maintenance (bubba)... I said that because a lot of people (management, engineers, IT, etc) think less of them even if the good maintenance workers are the backbone of the company

Its just a matter of pride, similar to troubleshooting... either you have it or you don't.