Fun fact: Behavioural scientists discovered that if you put a treat-dispensing lever in a rat cage, well, the rats will press it - but if you let it dispense treats arbitrarily they'll press it more than if every press yields a reward. Unpredictability causes obssessive behavior.
If you read this article by @pluralistic you'll probably understand why I thought of that little bit of trivia right now.
Also: Beware of "pay by the pull" deals ‼️
I see this in Industrial Automation over and over - I call it "Cargo Cult Syndrome".
1) Company buys complex automated machine, vendor comes in, trains some employees to operate and maintain it. Manuals are delivered & shelved somewhere.
2) Time passes. Trained employees train new employees, trained employees move on. New employees train other employees, etc. Manuals are forgotten. Each generation of training has more original knowledge getting lost, and more invented ritual added in - like "Hold reset five seconds, then turn this switch off and back on."
3) More time passes. Settable items on screens are no longer changed by the operators, they don't know about the settings - they just adjust things mechanically because they understand how to do that.
Past behaviors of the machine are invented: "It used to do X, but that broke a few years ago." In reality, X was an option that was never installed, it was never even wired for X, but it's so obvious that it _should_ do X that it becomes something that was there and is no longer working.
4) Something serious needs maintenance, I come in, find the manuals, read a bit, and see what the 20 year game of telephone has created. It's often tough to break the entrenched behaviors - "Press this, turn that, go over there, press that, turn the other, come back, press this to reset" is actually "step off the sensor mat to tell the machine you're fixing the problem, then come back and press Reset."
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