I'd Rather Be Writing » problem solving

Problem Solving and Sprinkler Repair

Tom Johnson — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 00:57:15 +0000

The other day Jane called and said I should come home because water was bubbling up in the sprinkler box in the yard. I don’t know anything about sprinkler systems, so with a sense of dread I drove home. Sure enough, the valve box was a puddle of water. I do know how to shut off the water to the sprinklers, so I did that and then waited for the water to soak down into the ground or evaporate.

The next day, when the water was dry, I checked the sprinkler box again and found a crack in one of the valves. I turned the sprinklers back on and saw the water shoot out of the crack. Since much of sprinkler repair seems to be hunting for the broken pipe, and digging aimlessly for it, I felt lucky to see the actual break.

I googled the problem a bit and learned that the valve was called an irrigation valve. There were a few videos on installing irrigation valves, and it looked fairly easy to do — if all the pieces were new and exposed and easy to reach. The only problem was that I couldn’t turn any of the pipes and simply unscrew the old pipe to insert the new valve in place.

I needed some advice on how to fix the cracked valve. I have a mechanical engineer friend who knows all about sprinklers, and he said I would need to dig out the ground a bit and “clip” the old pipe in order to unscrew it from the valve.

This was the first time I’d dug into the ground to find the sprinklers. I tried my best to dig, but the ground where I live is nothing but rocky clay, so after 20 minutes of using my shovel like a pick axe and getting nowhere, I soaked the ground with water, waited 20 minutes, and then shoveled again. The ground moved like butter.

I unearthed the pipes and realized the pipes and valves were more complicated than they originally appeared. Three pipes connected together in a tight space. Getting out the cracked valve would be more problematic than I thought. It all looked confusing, and I was wary of “clipping” a pipe.

At a lunch with my father-in-law, I asked him for advice on how to reconnect the pipe once I cut it, and he drew a diagram on a napkin and taught me some new terminology. The sprinkler box was a “manifold.” To connect the pipes I would need a “union” or “slip joint” or “connection coupling.”

I went to Home Depot and bought some spare parts according to what my father-in-law had said. The clerk gave me some more advice and told me what he thought I needed. Luckily sprinkler parts are cheap. I also bought a hacksaw and pair of channel locks.

Returning to the job, I cut the pipe that connected to the broken valve, and then attached the new valve. But to reconnect the pipe with a new coupling, I would need to bend back the pipe to make it fit. The pipe, however, wouldn’t bend at all. I consulted again with my sprinkler friend, and he said that the pipe wouldn’t move while it was impacted in the ground. I would need to dig a foot out on each side so that I could flex back the pipe and fit in the coupling.

After more digging, I had a big hole in my yard and another wheelbarrow full of dirt. I unearthed about two feet more of the pipe. Sure enough, the pipe now had more flex. I was still a little unclear about how to reconnect all the pipes, but I had to do something more than just stare at the problem, so I just applied the blue glue (which dries in ten seconds) and pulled the pipe back to fit over the coupling. I fit it together, but as I was screwing the pipe onto the new valve, I realized I had cut the pipe too short.

I stared at the problem again, scratching my head. Luckily the store clerk recommended that I buy an extra coupling. I asked my mechanical engineer friend for more advice (he happened to be walking down the street at the time), and he said I could cut the pipe again and add my second coupling next to the first to elongate the pipe. I did that, and sure enough it worked. Here’s a little video showing the solution.

A Simple Problem Solving Method

This blog isn’t about sprinkler repair. But the experience made me reflect on problem solving. Regardless of our jobs, it seems that problem solving follows the same general steps.

Identify the real problem. In the case of the sprinklers, I located the crack in the valve that was causing the problem. But this wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was figuring out how to install the new valve given the inflexibility of the pipes. Many times problems are just like this. There is a surface-level problem, but when you dig down a bit, you see that the real problem is something else entirely. Identifying the real problem, or the root cause of the problem, is the first step in problem solving.

Research the solution. I searched online and consulted with knowledgeable people around me about the problem. I could have probably read more books and articles on sprinkler repair, but it’s hard to compete with neighborly advice from people who have similar sprinklers as me and are willing to give it.

Get your hands dirty. Sometimes to get to the area where you can fix the problem, you can’t be afraid to get dirty and go places you haven’t been before. Digging up all that dirt was tedious and exhausting. I didn’t even mention the electrical wire that I partially cut. Whatever the problem — fixing a website, changing the rotors on a car, repairing your broken water heater — you’re going to have to get your hands dirty with the guts of the product.

Start trying different solutions. You can think about the problem all you want, but until you start to act, you may not get anywhere. I stared at the pipes for a long time before deciding that I just had to cut and glue something. I knew that after I started to act, it would be clear to me what I needed to truly do. It’s similar to a writing maxim you may have heard: How do I know what I think until I see what I say? Once we start writing, it becomes clear in our minds what we’re thinking. Once we start acting, it becomes clear in our minds what we need to do.

Be patient. It took me three days, two trips to Home Depot, and about five separate consultations with friends to fix the problem. Having patience and being persistent even when the solution is distant can be your greatest asset in solving any problem.

Problems Are Not Always This Simple

Despite my “methodology” in the steps above, I candidly recognize that not all problems are this simple. If I could solve every problem in my life by following these five steps, life would be a cakewalk. But life is much tougher. For example, financial problems, behavioral problems, psychological problems — these are not so easily solved in a three-day, five-step process. However, I think that the points above do provide a starting point.

In my life, I let many of the problems that surround me go unchallenged. Either I’m lazy, or I don’t believe the solution is achievable, or I’ve become desensitized to the problem and have learned to live with it. I’ve given up tackling the problems as problems, if you know what I mean. It takes a little thing like a broken sprinkler to boost my confidence and spur me to tackle other, more significant problems.

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Thoughts on Troubleshooting and Problem Solving

Tom Johnson — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 06:47:49 +0000

Utah mountains

Working in technology, I spend a good amount of my time troubleshooting. When things go wrong, I’ve learned a few tips and techniques:

Compare line by line against a working model
List all the components and how they work together
Challenge every assumption
Reboot or reinstall
Google the error messages you see
Site-search key sites
Come back to it later
Contact an expert
Post the question in a forum
Send the problem across Twitter

As today was MLK day and I had work off, I had a chance to dive into some WordPress projects on my to-do list. In prioritizing projects, I realized what I find so addictive about WordPress: the troubleshooting. When a project is easy, I find it boring. The challenges are what draw me. So I start with the most difficult first.

With WordPress problems, errors follow recurring patterns. If the alignment is completely wonky, it’s usually a div tag problem. If you receive sudden fatal errors that break the display, start deactivating plugins one by one. Is your cursor acting funny? Clear your browser’s cache or upgrade to the latest version of WordPress. Is there a problem with links not connecting to posts or pages? Check out the .htaccess file. If it’s a CSS problem, e.g., can’t figure out the style, and viewing the source code doesn’t work, I sometimes perform CSS brain surgery, chopping large parts of CSS code displayed with the Firefox CSS Web Developer extension until I find the controlling style.

I also find it fulfilling to solve other people’s problems, even if they’re easy. For example, a client called explaining a need to include a LinkedIn-Share-This type button below the post. I did some digging (on a LinkedIn network) to find the right plugin, and then implemented the plugin on the phone with the client. That was pretty cool.

In fact, I changed my WordPress training model to specifically address problems people are having (rather than giving them a generic WordPress how-to). Most people reach out to me after they bang their heads in vain a few days. They don’t want general information — they want to fix their problems.

In writing about troubleshooting, I don’t want to present myself as one without any technical problems. Like most people, I have a list of problems that I can’t quite seem to conquer. But that’s all right — it gives me a puzzle to solve, and the puzzles engage me.

Do you have any troubleshooting tips of techniques that work well for you? Or, for the WordPress users out there, what’s the most challenging problem you’ve faced, and how did you overcome it?

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Tapping your creative juices Interestin …

Tom Johnson — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 19:32:43 +0000

Tapping your creative juices
Interesting division of challenges into component parts: “Sometimes the problem is cognitive, e.g. learning and explaining. Sometimes the problem is emotional, e.g. conflict resolution. Sometimes the problem is spiritual, e.g. conflict of interest. Sometimes the problem is physical, e.g. constrained by available resources. And most of the time the problem is a lovely blending of components that taxes body, soul, and spirit.”

Five Skills Every Technical Writer Needs

Tom Johnson — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 04:51:01 +0000

A listener to the Tech Writer Voices podcast suggested I do a podcast on the following:

Give ideas to people who are just starting out in technical writing. What is the base of knowledge that every technical writer should have?

And so in preparation for the podcast, I offer these five skills or characteristics as absolute musts for the technical writer:

1. Facility with technology

You have to be somewhat technical, although there are many different kinds of technicalese. You may have a bent towards one of the sciences, and can understand the inner workings of cells or atoms. Or you may be web savvy and know how to interpret code. Or maybe you’re just curious about how things work. You can learn technologies you don’t understand, if you have the motivation. I personally enjoy learning about complicated systems. This understanding brings a sense of achievement and knowledge that is rewarding at the end of the day.

2. Ability to write clearly

The essential skill of any technical communicator is to disambiguate (to use a word my father introduced to me the other day). Your core job will consist of taking complicated things and trying to explain them in easy-to-understand ways. You can’t just pass off an explanation you only half understand. Writing about something (as opposed to talking about it) requires you to understand it thoroughly. Avoid passive sentences and long constructions. Go from old ideas to new. Define acronyms and avoid assumptions about what the user knows. Make the reader feel smart.

3. Talent in showing ideas graphically

I underestimated the importance of using Visio until just a few months ago. Any time you can show an idea graphically, you score a hundred points with the reader. Almost everyone is a visual person. People understand better when you can communicate your ideas visually (and I’m not just talking about screenshots here, although they do count for something). It is surprisingly easy to create half-decent diagrams in Visio. They go a long way toward making your writing clear.

4. Patience in problem-solving/troubleshooting

Unless you have patience, you’ll never make it. I think 80 percent of IT work consists of problem solving. What do you do when you can’t figure out how to do something? Do you slam your fist into your keyboard? Do you scream and curse when you can’t immediately figure something out? It’s amazing how you can see a seemingly impossible problem through with patience and persistence.

5. Ability to interact with SMEs

I talked about this in my last podcast on Tech Writer Voices. Interacting with SMEs is one the most overlooked skills in technical writing. You have to be part investigative reporter, part journalist. You can’t be shy about going after certain people to extract information. And you can’t be too proud to ask the “dumb technical questions” that make engineers do double-takes. A lot of this interaction can come about if you’re lucky enough to simply sit near SMEs.

I know I’m missing a few more essential qualities. I’d like to add a few more here. Any ideas?