A Self-Taught Troubleshooter
From Craftsman Tools to IT Networking — A Lifetime of Troubleshooting
by John D Bertucci
Nobody ever sat me down and taught me how to fix things. No class did it. No shop foreman did it. No mechanic ever stood over my shoulder and walked me through it. I learned the way a lot of us learned in those days — because something was broken, because we could not afford to pay somebody else to fix it, and because I wanted to know how it worked. That wanting to know turned into a thread, and that thread runs through my whole life: cars, television, computers, networks. Different machines. Same hands. Same question every single time — what is it doing, what is it supposed to be doing, and where did the two come apart?
No one trained me
I started fixing cars at fifteen, and I kept at it until I was about thirty. You know how many mechanics trained me? None. Not one. No mechanic shop ever employed me, either. What I had was a Chilton manual, a driveway, and tools I bought one piece at a time as I could afford them — Craftsman tools, the kind a working man bought a socket at a time and kept for life. When you buy your tools that way, you learn what every one of them is for, because you felt every one of them in your paycheck before you ever felt it in your hand.
My father was not the man to teach me, and that was not his fault. He came to America and was thirty-four years old before he ever got behind the wheel of a car. So the cars were my department. We had a three-car family fleet, and I maintained all of it — tune-ups, carburetors, oil changes, differential changes, brakes. Then I went deeper, because a troubleshooter always goes deeper: radiators, struts, bushings, cylinders, head gaskets. I took whole engines apart and put them back together. On a 1981 Datsun 210 I replaced just about everything that could be replaced — alternator, starter, distributor, water pump, brake pads, carburetors. I saved my parents thousands of dollars in repair bills, and nobody ever wrote me a check for it. The education was the check.
The job that proved it to me came when I was seventeen, in 1977. My mom’s 1976 Maverick quit starting, and after checking the solenoid and starter I traced the trouble to the ignition computer. This electronic box, in the seventies, made mechanics suspicious of anything in an engine bay that did not move. The part cost eighty dollars, and here was the catch: it was non-returnable. If I was wrong, the eighty dollars was gone. A lot of grown men would not have taken that bet on a kid’s diagnosis. My father did. We put the part in, and the car ran. I think about that moment a lot, because that is troubleshooting in its purest form. You do the work, you follow the signs, you narrow it down — and then you have to commit. Diagnosis without the nerve to act on it is just worrying with extra steps.
That is the first lesson the cars taught me, and I have never unlearned it: you take the thing apart in your head before you take it apart with your hands. You dissect it. You break the problem down until it is small enough to hold. Then you fix that piece, and you rebuild — and when you rebuild, you rebuild it better than you found it if you can.
Learning to trace a signal
Television found me next, and I spent twenty-five years in video production. People hear “video” and they think cameras and editing, and I did plenty of both, but underneath it I was an audio and video technician, and the bench work is where the car training paid off. A signal is like an engine. It starts somewhere, it travels a path, and it is supposed to arrive somewhere else in a certain condition. When it does not, you find out where it went wrong.
The man who taught me how to do that right was my friend Andre, a repair-shop genius who could not read a book — Andre was dyslexic — and could out-think just about any engineer I ever met. Andre showed me how to trace an electrical or video signal with an oscilloscope, from A to Z, watching it stage by stage until the waveform told on the broken part — the bad integrated circuit, the dead resistor, the failed capacitor. He showed me once or twice. After that, I did component-level repair for the next seven years. I rebuilt three-quarter-inch tape machines. I replaced video tubes from four inches to fourteen, adjusted yokes, set registration and color, and swapped power supplies. And I did all of it before the internet — no video to watch, no forum to ask. If I knew it, it came out of a book in a file cabinet or out of my own notes. I was not yet thirty.
My favorite repair from those years cost two dollars and thirty cents. A frame synchronizer had a broken circuit, and the manufacturer, Microtime, wanted fifteen hundred dollars to fix it. Andre looked at it and said we could probably fix it ourselves for $2.30 in parts. We borrowed an oscilloscope, got the schematics, and traced that circuit for about an hour until we found it. Two dollars and thirty cents. That is the whole philosophy in one story: the factory price is what they charge you for not knowing. Troubleshooting is knowing.
At Cox, I moved over from the shopping channel at about twenty-five, and the work got bigger. The tube cameras of that era needed daily pampering — registration, color balancing, rebooting camera control units — and if somebody bumped a multicore cable, the picture would split into its red, green, and blue pieces right on the air. I color-matched cameras and monitors with waveform monitors and vectorscopes, with color charts, black-and-white chip charts, and a flesh chart, until skin looked like skin. In time, twenty-two other people were let go and another man quit, and I was the one person kept — for eight years I was the only engineer there. The reason was simple, and I have never been embarrassed to say it plainly: I could fix everything.
The work nobody else wanted
After Hurricane Katrina, television let go of me before I let go of it — I was let go at the ministry and could not find another TV job, so I left the business I loved. The road to computers was not a straight line. For a while I was in the insurance business, and between about forty-six and forty-eight I passed six insurance exams, nine Microsoft exams, and an eight-hour hands-on networking exam, with a Cisco exam after a four-day boot camp later on — all of it before my fiftieth birthday. I spent nine thousand dollars going back to school and working my way up. People see the certifications, MCP, MCSE, MCSA, and think that is where the troubleshooter came from. It is not. The certifications opened the door. The driveway, the bench, and the oscilloscope are where the troubleshooter came from.
I started in casino IT as a PC tech and support tech and worked my way up to network administrator. Thirteen years, four casinos — four years at Harrah’s, a year and a half at L’Auberge, then Hollywood Casino and the Queen, which count as two because the Queen was a new company and a new job even though I parked in the same spot and walked in the same door. In those years I pushed out more than a thousand computers with my own hands, six hundred of them at Harrah’s alone, cloned from master images built for each department and labeled by name. I replaced six hundred monitors besides, from the old square screens to widescreen, with all new cabling. Nobody photographs that work. Nobody applauds it. But a casino runs on it.
My rule in IT was the same rule I had in the driveway and at the bench: take the work nobody else wants, and do it until you are the expert. In my first year at Harrah’s I mastered the cage — the money-counting cage, the hardest, dirtiest, most unforgiving corner of casino IT, with computers choked in money dust and a tangle of devices that had to sit on exactly the right ports or they failed. The other guys did not want to go down there. I went. I cleaned it, moved the machines, Velcroed and color-coded the wiring, and wrote the ports down. Before long, when the cage went down, I was the one they called, because I was the one who had done the work of learning it.
The biggest job was the server room. What I inherited was a storage room with four racks. What I built was a twelve-rack server room. I replaced the old HP switches with Cisco — five big switches, five hundred ports — powering devices down one at a time to learn what was still actually connected, because in a room like that, half the cables are lying to you. I took a network that was wide open and segmented it into twelve VLANs — printers on one, PCs on another, the cage and the money on their own, point-of-sale, IP phones, each in its proper place. Almost no cable in that place was labeled, so I traced them, one by one, with a NetScout handheld tool that could tell me closet, rack, switch, and port — and then I taught the other men to use it, because knowledge you keep to yourself dies with you. Down on the slot floor the same story repeated at scale: roughly a hundred floor switches and about a thousand ports, roughly one for every slot machine. And three separate times, at three casinos, I built the supply system from nothing — the inventory, the ordering, the purchasing, the labeling, the steel rack shelves, which I ordered and put together myself. At Hollywood and the Queen I wrote every purchase order. Every one of them.
Same hands, different machine
I have been asked, in one form or another, how a kid with a Chilton manual ends up running a casino network. The honest answer is that he never really changes jobs. He just changes machines. A carburetor, a camera chain, a cage computer, a core switch — every one of them is a system that takes an input, does something with it, and produces an output, and every failure I have ever fixed lived in the space between what the system was doing and what it was supposed to do. Find that space. That is the whole trade.
I have been self-motivated since I was fifteen. I call it my Internal Ambition Engine, and it has never needed anybody to wind it. I do not measure myself against the man next to me. I measure myself against yesterday, last month, last year. And my method has never changed: work the problem first, with your head and your hands, before you decide it cannot be done. If you want to eliminate stress, then be prepared. Procrastination is not even in my vocabulary. You learn the system, you keep your notes, you label your cables, and when something breaks — and something always breaks — you are ready.
These days the machine on my bench is a manuscript. I dissect a story the way I dissected an engine: take it apart, find the piece that is not doing its job, fix that piece, and rebuild it better. I edit the way I traced a signal, stage by stage, until the waveform is clean. It is the same thread, running from a fifteen-year-old flat on his back under a family car to a network administrator tracing unlabeled cables in a casino server room to a writer at his desk in the morning. Craftsman tools to IT networking, and now to the page.
So when somebody calls me a self-taught troubleshooter, I do not correct them. It is the truest job title I ever held — truer than technician, truer than engineer, truer than administrator. Nobody taught me. Life handed me broken things, one after another, for fifty years, and every broken thing was a teacher that did not know it was teaching. All I ever did was pay attention, keep my tools in order, and refuse to walk away from a problem just because it was not mine. It was mine the minute I touched it. It still is.
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