General Tips for the Technician

Over-caffeinating at work has the potential to lead to high anxiety, due to all the stresses of heavy workload, pushy service writers, deadlines, and your own personal demons.  Go easy on the caffeine, and try to cut yourself off around lunchtime.

Be patient with the vehicle you're working on.  If you get in a rush, the repair will quickly take a turn for the worse as you make progressively bigger and bigger mistakes.

If using an electronic dispatching system, note down in what state the vehicle is in on the job line or the comments section if you must put the vehicle on hold so the service writer can look at the work order and not have to contact you directly.

Learn to recognize when your body starts to feel tired and your mind starts to shut down.  This will generally happen around the fifth or sixth hour of your shift, as the stresses of the earlier part of the day start to stack up, and the deadlines for work draw nearer and nearer.  Take a break and get away from your work area and your coworkers for at least ten minutes.  Think about something else.  The work will still be there when you come back, and hopefully that brief decompression will restore enough of your energy to get through the last couple hours.

When taking large components off a vehicle, be sure to set them in a very visible spot, such as right in front of your computer terminal, or directly next to the vehicle.  This will reduce the possibility of forgetting to put them back on.

If you had to test drive a vehicle, put the final Out Mileage in the documentation for that particular job as well as at the end of the work order.  This will reduce the possibility of being backflagged on warranty repairs for missing mileage.

If you have a vehicle that you just performed a repair on and it still is exhibiting symptoms, do not quote your best guess to the service writer and say with certainty that's what the vehicle needs in order to be fixed.  Instead, always say it is still exhibiting symptoms, and that you need more time to properly diagnose the root cause.  What you fixed may have definitely been needed, but it may have just been a symptom of the underlying problem that you have not yet determined.