If my pilots name was Max Power we could be flying upside down and I’d still trust him.

Agreed. For me personally, I’ve got 3 things I do to which helps me figure out the problem most of the time without demeaning the customer or implying that they don’t have the knowledge.

1: Asking the right questions. My two most important and first ones are “What is it doing?”, and/or “What is it not doing?”. I find the question “what’s wrong with it?” to be almost entirely ineffective.

2: Talking in an appropriate technical level to the person you’re talking to. Eg, a 80 year old vs a 50 year old.

3: Using simple analogies. Eg. A CPU is like a brain, a motherboard like a body, a video card like legs to run really fast etc.