It was a complicated series of actions that he needed to take.
There was a great deal of pressure on him to get it right. The technician slid into the crawlspace and switched his head torch on. He opened the control panel and stared for a while at the wiring looms. There were a lot of them, all colour coded, with each section numbered. To the untrained eye it would be simply chaotic, but to a trained professional it didn’t pose much of a challenge. The only question was, in what sequence to perform each cut, each part replacement, each transfer of circuitry. That is why he had memorised the twenty-eight steps in their precise order before squashing himself into the very tight space. In his head, he had the procedure set out in a list of actions, much like the tracks on a music CD.
He went to back the terminal screw off the purple wire on rack B4, when he stopped. That’s not right, he thought. He wouldn’t do that until he’d rerouted the red on rack D7 to rack B3. He was running through the list that he had so carefully committed to memory and learnt by heart, when he suddenly realised that somehow it had been set on ‘shuffle’.
