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One thing I learned in graduate school is to take lots of photos of what you're working on. Even if the photo doesn't eventually turn out to shed light on what you think you were taking the picture of, sometimes something totally unrelated will be in view that's useful in some other way.
Working on my beetle yesterday, I was vexed that there are too many things in the way for me to get at the brake warning light, which is at the top center of the dash board and so is obscured from the rear by the windshield wiper motor and the radio. There's a bunch of wires that apparently go toward some of the switches on the dash, but I don't know which ones go to which, necessarily.
It occured to me this morning that I could actually count the wires that are in that bundle and deductively try to fiture out which wires are which. Here's the bundle:
Note there are two red wires, one bigger than the other, in this bundle, and a blue wire. Comparing that to this section of the wiring diagram that contains roughly the same wires (E1 is the lights switch, K7 is the brake warning night, E9 is the blower fan control switch and E3 at the bottom is the emergency flasher switch):
The only blue wire in this whole area, and one of the only two blue wires in the car, are in the group that go to the brake warning light, which is what I'm looking for. In fact, as the wires go toward the left side of the picture, there seems to be a separation between the fatter wires on the top and the skinnier wires at the bottom, and each bundle has a red wire.
Now there is one other red wire in the general area, which goes to the emergency flasher switch. As I look for the red wire that goes to the brake light warning, I need to make sure that whatever red wire I have isn't the one to the flasher switch. This shouldn't be a problem because both the red wire that goes to the lights switch and the one that goes to the emergency flasher switch connect to the fuse box, wheras the one that goes to the brake warning light ends up connecting to wires that go down to the brake master cylinder.