It's thunderstorm season, and when the power goes out at one branch office, the uninterruptible power supplies kick in, everything shuts down, and this pilot fish waits for power to return. And waits. And waits. "Late evening sees the power restored, and we go about bringing the network back to life," says fish. "Next morning, the phone rings. It's a very irate corporate admin wanting to know why we had an unscheduled outage the day before. I calmly explain about the storm, which I had no control over. His response? 'Next time, put it on the schedule before you have an unexpected outage!'"

Aha!

User complains her PC is dead -- even Ctrl-Alt-Del won't work. Support pilot fish stops by, makes sure keyboard is plugged in, hits Ctrl-Alt-Del, and the log-in prompt pops right up. "I pretty much wrote the incident off as 'mechanic's syndrome,' where the problem doesn't occur in the presence of a mechanic," says fish. "Later, however, the user owned up to how she had removed the keys from the keyboard in order to clean it. Seems that when you switch the Alt key and the Windows key, Ctrl-Alt-Del no longer works."

Wishful thinking

Support pilot fish gets a frantic call from an e-mail user: She's not getting any e-mails sent by her boss, so she missed a very important meeting. "The boss is on the warpath and blaming the mail servers," fish says. "We sent several test e-mails from the boss's mailbox with traces running, and the trace routes showed that the e-mails were being delivered. But a careful review of the user's mailbox revealed a rule that put all e-mail from her boss into the trash and deleted it after 24 hours."