By The Book

In my past life as a telephone company employee, the work I performed was documented in reference documents called BSP's. BSP was the acronym for Bell System Practice, and old Ma Bell was real good about defining jobs and how to do things "by the book". Every task was documented with pictures, illustrations, circuit diagrams when necessary, and descriptions of how to perform just about every possible task involved with installing any type of phone or PBX system. There were thousands of BSP's and the documentation effort really was amazing. You could almost think of these manuals as super owners manuals as they went into installing, troubleshooting, and repairing just about everything Ma Bell had, and what her employees did. There was a section on sharpening pole climbers for example.

Later on in my career, I performed advanced customer support now and then, and I sometimes had to recommend customers remove the shrink-wrap from their manuals for the product they were asking about... They didn't read the owners manual and had no clue what the features and limitations were. They just assumed it would keep working on "autopilot".

With worldwide demonstrations recently by folks concerned with the environment, it shows that a lot people around the globe are concerned. Too bad their isn't an owners manual for planet earth that we could follow "by the book". Without one we sure have a lot of questions about proper operation with no clear answers. The following YouTube video comes up with an interesting conclusion...