Shark Tank: No brainer -- or anything else

30.03.2006
This pilot fish works for an IT consulting outfit, managing consultants at a remote office. And he gets an idea -- one that seems like a no-brainer.

"I want to provide a PC for training purposes in the office," says fish. "The idea is that when a consultant is on the bench -- not on a job -- he can spend the time learning something new, using the PC.

"The office manager thinks this is a good idea too, so he approves my requisition."

A month later, the new PC arrives. But there's not enough memory or disk space for the tools that the consultants would need to learn. Fish calls HQ and is told that another hard drive and more memory will be shipped.

A month after that, the additional memory and hard drive arrive. And it takes another few weeks to schedule a tech to install them. Fish knows how and has been upgrading PCs for years, but he is expressly forbidden from doing this upgrade himself.

"Finally, the tech comes to perform the upgrade," fish says. "He installs the memory, swaps out the hard drive and leaves before I can check out the machine.