got that call all the time. the installation team is on site and the BOM is mostly there but missing the fixed plant adapters. "we decided to just have the GI's make up cables".
oh by the way. can you fax the pin outs for the mil connectors to the team chief?
and you just pray that they have tools. and pins. and shells.
a couple of weeks later when nothing works you scrounge some fpa's and fed ex them half way around the planet.
thank god all those antiques have been scraped by now. (i hope)
Having some controlled equipment experience, though not on that particular unit, but our specific ones, I'd guess that "not using the FPA" would be breach of protocol. Unless you're in the right facility, where TEMPEST is not an issue (inside Faraday box under n metres bedrock, for instance.) I'd never dare to swerve from the BOM there. Unless there was a shooting war going on, et c.
I have a somewhat lighter story on the "site tech gets things fuckerized" -- I was the router guy, supposed to sit on my chair and make things work remotely, but I also was the one with the most actual experience of h/w servicing our backbone routers, so when one of them decided that one of its Clock Scheduler Cards
and one of the Switch Matrix Cards were more like turnips than digital multiplex circuits I was the one to find it, diagnose it, and tell the maintenance org what spare parts to request,
and for good measure, I went out with them to do the card swap too. That went really well, and we ended up with full redundancy and all.
As I was on-site, I spent some time looking at a piece of transmission equipment only to find that the contractor had completely misunderstood the cabling sheet for a work package that was claimed complete, and that one of my remote config projects depended on. I clearly saw where they'd fucked up and why nothing was working, fixed the issue (thereby making the on-site documentation correct) and immediately saw that the previously missing comms link had started working. That particular project was probably the most important one I'd been involved with, and it was wedged due to a contractor fuckup.
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