It Happens Every Spring
This company spends extra on redundant routers, redundant switches and redundant connections from separate providers. "Imagine our surprise when, early the first spring after installing all this, our connection goes down," groans a pilot fish on the scene. "Turns out that over certain stretches, one provider was leasing fiber from the other, and it ran under a farmer's field. Come spring, the farmer came out with his backhoe, and -- well, you know. Now every spring, we have at least a half-day of outage. They never tell us if it's the same farmer every time."
Some Help
Help desk pilot fish gets a call from an employee who says the number listed in the phone book for his government department is a porno hotline. "I immediately called the number," says fish, "and was greeted by a voice that said, 'Hi, stud!' I called the telephone company and they said they knew about the problem and it would be corrected in next year's directory." And when the new book arrives? "The porno number was gone," sighs fish. "It was replaced by the help desk number."
Well, Sort Of
IT pilot fish brings in his own wireless mouse to use at work, which makes his life easier. But as he's fixing a problem for a user one day, using keyboard shortcuts and not touching the mouse, user comments, "Your mouse is broken." Why do you say that? asks fish. User: "The tail is missing."
Workingfinenow
Support pilot fish takes a personal call from an elderly friend who can't get her e-mail working correctly. A few step-by-step instructions later, fish receives a test message, but he tells elderly user that he sees the problem: All the words in the test message are running together, making it almost impossible to read. User: "Oh, my sister said to leave all the spaces out."
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