Aha!

Pilot fish can't log in to get his e-mail one morning, and he figures he needs his password reset, as usual. But instead, the help desk opens a trouble ticket and promises to send a tech out right away. "About 2:30 p.m. the tech shows up," grumbles fish. "He spends half an hour checking the setup and reinstalling software. The system still refuses to authenticate. Finally, he calls the e-mail guru. After a short conversation, he hangs up, turns to me and says, 'Your server has been down all day.'"

Completeness

It's the early 1990s, and this Cobol developer pilot fish skips lunches and works late nights and weekends to finish 18 similar reports that one department says are needed urgently. A few weeks later, fish asks a user how the reports are performing. "The user told me they only wanted a couple of the reports, but they had asked for all 18 because they were undecided which would be the most useful," says stunned fish. "They were running two of them and mothballed the other 16, never to be used again."

Tradition