Not HE related, but in the same vein. Back in the mid ‘80s, the Air Force decided to retrain a slew of people from over to undermanned fields. We got a guy from facilities maintenance retrained into aircraft electronics. He was an E6 and no one could tell him anything. That’s where the fun began.
One of the systems we worked was a dispenser that was really just an overly-complex stepper switch that applied pulses to fire squibs in a particular order. There was one circuit card involved and it was really 2 identical circuits mirror imaged on each side of the card. Fresh out of tech school and outranking all of us peons, he decided he was going to troubleshoot and repair one.
What started out as a very common failure that everyone else knew required replacement of a single capacitor took me about 2 weeks to work my way through in between other jobs. We had a really large stock of components that were used primarily for another system we also worked. Many electronic components look alike if you don’t know what you’re doing, and he didn’t. Rather than look in the parts manual, he randomly selected components from bench stock and just soldered them into both sides of the board. The issue that took me the longest to figure out was that he left an insulator off the bottom of one of the driver transistors, so the output pulses were shorting to ground.
He never touched another thing and spent the remainder of his time there doing admin stuff. His name was Rucker, but after that he was “endearingly” known as Wrecker.