Field manual.
Field notes curated as training reading. Every entry is a real install — what the drawings didn't show, when the right answer was no, and who owns what goes wrong. Read them before your first solo job.
The lobby display that shouldn't have taken three days
A commercial lobby install in Scottsdale that looked simple on paper — one 86" display, one media player, one wall mount. Here's what the drawings didn't show and how we got out clean.
You touch it, you own it
A two-man CRT decommission in an Arizona NOC turned into a near-miss when a 16-foot length of black iron pipe came down through a ceiling like a broadsword. The rust on its threads told a longer story — about who owns the failures left behind by people long gone.
You want to be responsible?
Four installs across as many years where the right answer was no — a CRT we shouldn't have lifted by hand, a hospital wall spec that ignored physics, a basement wall that moved when I touched it, and a brand-new bank office that wasn't a room yet. The thread running through all of them is the same question.
Patience
Two installs — a dormakaba entrance control at a California airport and an Alvarado multi-lane in Colorado — same shape of problem: we showed up ready to work and the site wasn't ready for us. The real story isn't the install. It's the four days of standing around before the install became possible, and the part of the job nobody quotes for: waiting well.