basic troubleshooting

So a friend calls me last night and says his left speaker has gone out and is only producing alternator whine.  The right speaker still seems to be working fine.  I spend two hours with him on the phone discussing all sorts of possible causes, including a speaker wire that's come loose or a crossover that's shorted to ground or a bad amplifier channel or a loose ground or a cut RCA cable or a bad connection at the head unit or a defective head unit.  I walk him through disassembling his left door panel and how to check the speakers and the crossover and have him hand-over-hand inspect his speaker cables.  All seems OK. He says next let's make sure an RCA cable is OK so he pulls his head unit first and checks the connections there which are all fine, then he says oh yea, the amp is under my seat.  So he slides his seat forward and notices the left RCA cable has been knocked out of the amp.  He plugs it back in.  Problem solved.

Moral of the story: basic troubleshooting says to check the obvious things first.  Duh.  I feel like a buffoon.

  You just didn't want to embarrass your friend by asking him to check something so obvious.

Yeah, that's it.

Now that's funny!

How true is that one! Actually had one today!

Well DYohn I guess that was a bit of a humbling experience? I suppose the K.I.S.S. method can be applied almost every where.

That's the first thing I was taught in this industry. Be humble and stay humble. One can feel like the best installer and an overly confident attitude puts a hole through a gas line, talk about humbling!

No hard feelings DYohn...sheesh.

The problem (in this case) lies in being on the phone and not there on the spot.  I hate it when I can't do my own inspection.  If he were there, DYohn could have solved it in 10 minutes and saved his friend two hours of "consultation" billing.  Now THAT'S a hefty sum!