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Heard a trainee complaining about zip ties in Omaha, and it flipped my whole view on cable dressing
Was training a greenhorn named Marcus out in Omaha on a Tuesday, and he kept huffing every time I told him to reset a zip tie so the jacket wasn't pinched. He finally goes, "Dude, it's just a tie, the signal doesn't care." And I almost snapped back, but then I remembered being 22 and thinking the same thing, so I just told him to come back to that box in 3 weeks and see how it looked. Sure enough, we rolled back to that same job for an unrelated service call, and his bundle had sagged into the stud bay, one tie had cut into the cable and we had to redo the drop. Turns out it wasn't about the tie, it was about the fact that heat and gravity and vibration do the deciding over time, not us. Marcus didn't say a word, just grabbed the flush cutters and started over without me asking. The thing that got me is nobody ever explained the *why* to him, they just barked rules at him like the last guy did to me. Now I keep a cut piece of jacket in my pouch to show every new guy what a tight tie actually does under the surface. Has anyone else had luck getting trainees to buy in by showing them the failure instead of just telling them the rule?
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tylerpark6d ago
Watching a guy fail once beats nagging him about it forever.
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