first started in working "Operations", procedures were not allowed. You actually had to know what you were doing on the fly. You were issued orders, you repeated them back, then you wrote them down long hand, and then you handed them to the issuing operator who checked what you wrote. Then you went out and did the physical work. Now you don't blink without a procedure with a preamble.

If the guy who wrote the procedure missed a step and it wasn't caught by guys at my level then the operator and his "checker" were on their own. Hopefully, the two guys weren't so stuck in the moment that he couldn't see the error and they stop before it got ugly. I set in on several investigations where something was missed and the situation went south. At 220 thousand volts, when it goes bad it goes bad really fast and it's really ugly. Relay switching is a different story. If you mess up testing relays you have a pretty good chance that it's not going actually "Blow Up". It'll take the station down and maybe the state or a couple of states but it's not going to start melting thing.... usually.

The problem is that there is so much switching of equipment going on that now you can't work without procedures. The switching is so complex and with so many steps that it just can't be done. We had 600 step procedures. Most were in the 10 to 12 step range but maintenance procedures get really long. If you miss one step you could be done for. Maybe you get away with it but you're still screwed because you have to report what you did. The first question is "why didn't you catch the mistake prior to making it? The second question is "who wrote the procedure?"