Finally admitted I was wrong about using contact cleaner on every connector

I used to swear by spraying contact cleaner on every cannon plug I touched until I worked on a 737 at KMTN last March. A senior tech watched me drench a connector and said I was just pushing dirt deeper into the pins. He was right - I had been troubleshooting intermittent faults that were my own doing for years. Has anyone else had a mentor call them out on something they thought was standard practice?

3 comments

3 Comments

blair_nguyen1mo ago

Lol yeah I was the same until I fucked up a pitot static drain.

hannah3201mo ago

Right, that "fucked up a pitot static drain" line hit close to home because it made me realize how often we only learn the real rules after we break something. It's like how nobody reads the manual for their car until the check engine light comes on, or how I didn't learn to back up my files until I lost a whole project. We all seem to operate on luck until that one mistake teaches us the lesson for good.

kaigibson1mo ago

Nah I actually think that mindset is a cop out lol. Reading the manual BEFORE you fuck up is how you avoid being the guy who grounds a whole fleet because you didn't know a basic procedure. I've seen too many people use "you learn from mistakes" as an excuse to be lazy about prep work. Like yeah mistakes teach you stuff but thats dumb when the info is already there and you just ignored it.