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Shark Tank: Useless information

13.02.2006
Pilot fish gets a call from a consultant who says he's supposed to access certain files on a server. How are they used? consultant asks. Fish explains that File 1 gets additions daily. Then, every Tuesday, it's copied to File 2, and File 1 is cleared. Then File 1 gets daily information written to it again for a week. A few days later, consultant calls again. File 1 is empty -- was it deleted? Fish patiently explains the rotation again. Consultant: "Oh yeah, you told me that the other day, but I thought it was useless information that I didn't need, so I deleted it from my brain."

Oops!

It's the eve of a much-publicized computer virus attack, and this pilot fish sends out a reminder to all users not to open any e-mails promising dirty pictures. Next day, he gets a distress call from an engineer. "His laptop had crashed," says fish. "He had skipped over my warning e-mail, which arrived first in his in-box, and opened the pornographic attachment to start his day! Much to his embarrassment, he had to explain to my boss what had happened in order to get IT to expedite the re-imaging of his laptop."

But thanks for asking

At the daily status meeting with users, IT pilot fish reports that the mainframe is running slowly because of month-end jobs. What does that mean? users ask. "I explained that there were more jobs running on the mainframe, which caused things to run longer and impacted getting things done in the normal time period," fish says. "Again they asked, so that means what? I then said slowly, 'Jobs... are... taking... longer.' They asked no further questions."

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