I am absolutely talking about troubleshooting. If the client needs training, you need to troubleshoot the way he operates the system to learn that. Why touch anything at all before seeing what he does?

The client is witnessing an operational problem with the system. (Let's say for some dumb reason he picks up the TV remote and hits channel up after turning on the system.) So he calls you to get it fixed.

The first thing you need to do is to see the problem. If you turn on the system and, reasonable person that you are, you don't hit channel up on the TV remote, the system will come on and work perfectly. This leaves him wondering how you did that and leaves you thinking he doesn't know what he's doing.

Sure, this has to do with training the client, but you won't know that until you let him turn the system on... so why not start by having him turn the system on? That way his thought that there's a problem (though he won't see yet that the problem is his idiocy) will be confirmed; you will see the thing he's complaining about; and you will know at that point whether it is truly a troubleshooting or a training issue.

If the system has a problem, it's a problem when HE operates it. YOU operating it without seeing what he does only delays things.

And God help you if you think you know what the problem is before the system is even turned on, and you reach behind things and mess with the wires. You might "fix" the problem by wiggling a wire you did not intend to even touch, meaning you won't know what you have done to "fix" it. You'll think it's fixed, only to go away and have the problem recur.

So, you continue to operate the system properly, and eventually discover there's no problem with the system; I'll continue to have him turn it on and have the occasional "ah, I see that you're doing something that creates this problem."

A lady in Beverly Hills gladly paid us for a service call, during which we showed her that she was putting the CDs into her Pioneer 100 disc player with the label on the wrong side. The crazy thing is that the orientation of CDs on this player was the reverse of the orientation of the CDs on her Pioneer multidisc player in the other room.

We had her show us what she did to play a CD, then what she did to play a new CD. That was about a minute's time. We did not have to check audio performance, or speaker connections, or anything at all beyond what she was doing.