The disk units look like washing machines lined up in a row when fish arrives on Sunday morning to help pull the cables, connect them up and restart the mainframes.

But when he does, there's a surprise: He doesn't see the "unlabeled volume placed off-line" messages he expects.

"This was the first time we had installed used equipment," says fish. "When I brought up the first system and didn't see that message, I issued some display commands. Lo and behold, the devices were online but had kinda weird volume names. And sure enough, they had somebody else's data on them!"

Fish knows what to do: wipe the drives and start from scratch. But first he pokes around a little to see if there's anything interesting on them.

One of the first data sets he finds is a disaster recovery plan. In fact, it's a DR plan for a competing bank -- including a staff list complete with phone numbers.