Had an APU inlet door actuator eat my Wednesday and the paperwork was worse than the fault
Spent about 4 hours in the hangar chasing an intermittent door fault on a CRJ that turned out to be a chafed wire I found by wiggling the harness at the wrong moment. Anyone else ever fix the plane in 20 minutes but spend the rest of the shift writing up why it took so long?
Twenty minutes of actual work and then three hours of typing into the maintenance tracking system because the box for "reason for delay" only lets you pick from a dropdown that never has the right answer. Had a flap asymmetry fault last month that was a loose cannon plug, clicked it back in, done. But the log entry needed a whole story about the troubleshooting steps so the next guy would understand, and the ops write-up needed a different version because they don't read squawks. Meanwhile the plane is sitting there airworthy and the gate agent is calling asking when it's coming back. The fix is fast, the truth is short, and the paperwork is what actually keeps you late.