"One particular user wasn't in the office much, but one day she came in and needed a bit of help," says fish. "That was unusual both for her and her department.

"I spent a couple of hours working on her issues, then I wrote the charge number for the department and the service down and recorded it in our time-capture application at the end of the month."

A few weeks go by, and fish gets a call from that user's department at headquarters, asking about the charge: "Did you do something for Marge during March? If so, what?"

Fish looks in his database, explains to the HQ staffer what he did for the user and hangs up. Then fish logs a quarter-hour charge to the department for answering the question -- category: Miscellaneous Services.

A month later, there's another call. "Did you charge my department for something?" Yes, says fish, I had to look up my services to relate to the charges from a couple of months ago.