Foquet
05-10-2006, 02:23 PM
Sorry if this post is rather long. As a long time subscriber to The Shark Tank...we tech-heads (and not so tech-heads) might appreciate these stories:
From the Computer World's Shark Tank (http://www.computerworld.com/departments/opinions/sharktank/)
Where There's Smoke ...
"I think my monitor is on fire!" user tells help desk pilot fish. Call the fire department, fish says immediately. "But can't you just come look at it?" user asks. "I don't see flames, but it went black and I smell smoke." Hang up and call the fire department! fish tells her. So she does. "They came and took her burned popcorn out of the microwave," sighs fish. "And her screen came back when she moved her mouse."
THAT'S what they're for!
This sysadmin pilot fish is in charge of a group of servers that's spread over a wide area. Some sites have their own IT people; at others, local office staffers do things like load and remove backup tapes.
And one remote site has nothing but problems with backup. "Things happen so often that the hardware vendor's service engineer is on a first-name basis with the office manager who pulls the backup tapes each day," fish says.
"The engineer replaces several tape drives and eventually the library robot components. After one recent tape drive swap, he mentions that a tape was lodged in the drive, and he removed all the gooey stuff from the tape, but we ought to destroy it."
Gooey stuff? Fish is busy dealing with another problem at the time, but the comment about "gooey stuff" keeps running through his mind. There's nothing gooey in a tape or a drive, he thinks.
Meanwhile, the remote office manager e-mails fish with a request: She needs more backup tapes because she's having to throw away about one gooey tape per week, her message says.
Fish calls the office manager and asks about the gooey stuff. And he's startled by her response.
"The off-site storage company puts a bar-code label on the tapes when they pick them up," she says. "They peel them off when the tape is returned. Some of the adhesive stays on the tape."
Fish is furious. He calls the off-site storage company and demands to know why adhesive labels are being put directly on the tapes.
"OK, we'll use a solvent to remove the extra adhesive in the future," the account administrator tells him.
But why not just put the label on the nice plastic tape box instead? fish suggests.
"The site doesn't send the tapes in the plastic boxes," account administrator says.
Fish hangs up and dials again. Why are the tapes going off-site without their protective boxes? he asks the office manager.
"I didn't know we were supposed to use those," the office manager says. "I have hundreds in a cabinet, and I was wondering what to do with them."
Then maybe someone will sniff out a bargain
Support pilot fish works for a networking vendor -- one that makes high-end switches and routers. The customers are all big outfits, but most of them aren't as demanding as this health care group.
Or as cheap. "They were always wanting minor troubles escalated to top priority, trying to jump the ticket queue or wanting something for free," fish says.
"The main IT shop was located outside the city limits, but the network hub was downtown in their hospital building to help save on intracity circuit costs. Their entire LAN and voice network ran through this hub, tens of thousands of dollars worth of networking equipment -- in a converted janitor's closet."
Fish knows why it's there, because he was in on the installation. "Because of hospital politics, the IT manager couldn't kick anyone out of their office to build a real server room," he says. "They cleaned up the janitor's closet, took out the mop tub, painted and put down white tiles. But it still contained water and steam pipes and a large cast-iron waste stack.
"A year or two later, the waste stack became plugged somewhere down in the basement. The sewage backed up several floors until the waste stack burst. The resulting flood sprayed several hundred gallons of raw sewage into the little network room."
The IT manager calls the vendor's support line, screaming that this event was covered under his expensive maintenance contract, and he wants the vendor to fix the networking problem by cleaning the sewage out of the equipment.
"We all pulled out copies of the contract," says fish. "He was correct. We were obliged to fix the equipment when it failed. The contract was rather nonspecific about what constituted a failure.
"So I finally agreed that we would make any corrective measures needed to repair the equipment -- as soon as they removed the hazardous medical waste from the hardware. I pointed out that we did not manufacture ... that."
Silence. Then the IT manager asks for a complete set of replacement equipment.
"I agreed," fish says. "We would make a maximum effort to get him replacement hardware -- as soon as he sent me a purchase order for the full list value of the equipment."
In the end, the IT manager sends the purchase order. Fish grabs every available piece of equipment from his manufacturing area, loading dock and test labs to fill the order. It's air-freighted out that afternoon, and when fish arrives to install it, there's a newly vacated office to serve as the network room.
"I never saw inside the old room again," he says. "It was apparently converted back into a janitor's closet after it was cleaned. And we never did see the equipment from the old network room, either.
"Maybe it will turn up on eBay someday."
Click!
User at this museum manages to delete every name from the member database, and she promptly calls pilot fish in to help. "I was going to save my work, and I accidentally clicked Delete rather than Save," user explains. Usually, a dialog box asks if you're sure you want to do this, fish points out. "Yes, one did," says user, "and I clicked OK." Why? "I always click OK," user says. "I don't have time to read them, so I just click OK."
Right the first time
It's the 1980s, and this field engineer pilot fish has just gotten a phone call from a customer whose minicomputer is dead -- just before a team of auditors is scheduled to arrive.
"I began to ask him a few basic troubleshooting questions about power, lights, etc.," says fish. "His response to me was, 'What do you think I am, some kind of $#@% moron? Of course I checked that stuff already.'
"I reminded him that his office was about 60 miles away and that if I showed up and found the problem to be something we could have resolved over the phone I was going to charge him for the service call.
"Arrogantly, he demanded I waste no more of his time and to 'get my butt out here ASAP,' as I was costing his company money by sitting there on the phone."
So fish drives the 60 miles to the site, and begins his examination by looking behind the computer to see if anything has been disconnected.
"The UPS was plugged into the wall and the lights on the front panel indicated all was well with the UPS unit," fish says. "I noticed that a cassette player was sitting on top of the computer and apparently was plugged into the UPS. I checked the connections on the back of the UPS unit and found the power cord to the computer was lying on the floor unplugged from the back of the UPS.
"I plugged the power cord back in and the system rebooted. After spending about four hours repairing the damage from the uncontrolled shutdown, I was satisfied the system was fully operational."
Then fish tracks down the cleaning guy and asks if he knows anything about the plug being pulled.
"The only place I can plug my vacuum cleaner in is in the back of the UPS," cleaning guy says. "And up until yesterday, there was always one outlet available."
But when someone plugged in the cassette player, the last empty outlet was filled. And because the computer's power cord was the easiest one to reach, that's the one the cleaning guy unplugged.
"Sorry I forgot to plug it in again," he tells fish.
But when fish tells the customer what he's found -- and that he'll be charged for the service call -- the customer's response is a little more emphatic.
"Well," he says, "it looks like I am a @#$% moron!"
It's all the PC he needs
The company's executive offices are being recarpeted over the weekend, so it's up to this IT manager pilot fish to move all the bigwigs' computer equipment on Friday. Then he heads out for a conference the next week.
"I had instructed one of my technicians to reinstall the equipment on Monday," fish says. "During my third conference session on Monday, I received an emergency page from my system operator. I left the session to find out what happened -- fearing the worst."
Turns out the emergency is the company's president. He's furious that someone went through his desk while it was outside his office.
Why is he sure someone has rifled through his desk? "My technician had asked where his mouse was," fish says. "And since it was missing, someone had stolen his mouse. So therefore that same person obviously went through his personal items."
Fish knows better: The president's PC is actually an ancient machine that never had a mouse. But he also knows that it's not safe for any IT underling to explain to the president exactly what he's got on his desk.
"I told her to get a mouse from our dead stock and place it on his desk and throw the cord behind the credenza, because he won't know the difference," says fish.
"It worked -- and it stayed that way until we replaced the equipment two years later."
And don't miss the daily meeting on efficiency
This IT pilot fish is in the last four months of his job with a state agency. He knows he's a short-timer, but he still wants to do good work -- when he can.
But it's not easy to find time. "The IT manager was so paranoid about making a mistake that we had a three-hour meeting every day to talk about what we did the day before," fish grumbles. "Then -- I kid you not -- we had a one-hour meeting at the end of the day to wrap up what we did.
"After a month of this, I complained we had too many meetings. So we had a department meeting to discuss this."
Fish's final assignment is to design a database to track the agency's manuals and reference materials. "I knocked it out in three days," he says. "Then I spent the last four months of my employment working on the training manual. And I actually finished that in a week."
Then it's time to do the cover. Fish scans in an image of the facility director working at a computer, and takes the rough draft of the cover to the first of a series of -- what else? -- meetings to discuss how to tweak it.
"They asked things like, 'Can you move the keyboard over to the left?' and 'Can you put a book over there?' " says fish.
"I used a decent image editor and had to keep tinkering with the image. I even added some things that you would only see if you looked really close. Such as an earring stud on his left ear. And a tattoo on his forearm, blended in with the shadows, that said 'Latin Till I Die.'
"I spent my final three months and three weeks working on that cover page."
Someday My Prints Will Come
Corporate help desk pilot fish gets a call from the manager at one of the company's retail stores. The printer is giving an error message: Close back door. "I checked the back door, and it was shut," manager says. Try opening the back door and shutting it again, fish suggests. "If I open the back door, the fire alarm will go off," user protests, "and mall security will have to come to the store to shut it off." No, sighs fish -- please close the back door of the printer.
Don't Try This at Work
Sent on a jammed-printer call, pilot fish finds a T-shirt sticking out of the desktop printer, along with two rulers that were being used to help the T-shirt along. On the PC's screen: a picture of the user's grandchild. User's explanation: Her teenage son's friend had a T-shirt with a picture of his dog on it -- which the friend said he'd done on his computer. "Thinking it a good idea, she purchased the plain white T-shirt and fired up a painting application," fish sighs. "And the rest you know."
From the Computer World's Shark Tank (http://www.computerworld.com/departments/opinions/sharktank/)
Where There's Smoke ...
"I think my monitor is on fire!" user tells help desk pilot fish. Call the fire department, fish says immediately. "But can't you just come look at it?" user asks. "I don't see flames, but it went black and I smell smoke." Hang up and call the fire department! fish tells her. So she does. "They came and took her burned popcorn out of the microwave," sighs fish. "And her screen came back when she moved her mouse."
THAT'S what they're for!
This sysadmin pilot fish is in charge of a group of servers that's spread over a wide area. Some sites have their own IT people; at others, local office staffers do things like load and remove backup tapes.
And one remote site has nothing but problems with backup. "Things happen so often that the hardware vendor's service engineer is on a first-name basis with the office manager who pulls the backup tapes each day," fish says.
"The engineer replaces several tape drives and eventually the library robot components. After one recent tape drive swap, he mentions that a tape was lodged in the drive, and he removed all the gooey stuff from the tape, but we ought to destroy it."
Gooey stuff? Fish is busy dealing with another problem at the time, but the comment about "gooey stuff" keeps running through his mind. There's nothing gooey in a tape or a drive, he thinks.
Meanwhile, the remote office manager e-mails fish with a request: She needs more backup tapes because she's having to throw away about one gooey tape per week, her message says.
Fish calls the office manager and asks about the gooey stuff. And he's startled by her response.
"The off-site storage company puts a bar-code label on the tapes when they pick them up," she says. "They peel them off when the tape is returned. Some of the adhesive stays on the tape."
Fish is furious. He calls the off-site storage company and demands to know why adhesive labels are being put directly on the tapes.
"OK, we'll use a solvent to remove the extra adhesive in the future," the account administrator tells him.
But why not just put the label on the nice plastic tape box instead? fish suggests.
"The site doesn't send the tapes in the plastic boxes," account administrator says.
Fish hangs up and dials again. Why are the tapes going off-site without their protective boxes? he asks the office manager.
"I didn't know we were supposed to use those," the office manager says. "I have hundreds in a cabinet, and I was wondering what to do with them."
Then maybe someone will sniff out a bargain
Support pilot fish works for a networking vendor -- one that makes high-end switches and routers. The customers are all big outfits, but most of them aren't as demanding as this health care group.
Or as cheap. "They were always wanting minor troubles escalated to top priority, trying to jump the ticket queue or wanting something for free," fish says.
"The main IT shop was located outside the city limits, but the network hub was downtown in their hospital building to help save on intracity circuit costs. Their entire LAN and voice network ran through this hub, tens of thousands of dollars worth of networking equipment -- in a converted janitor's closet."
Fish knows why it's there, because he was in on the installation. "Because of hospital politics, the IT manager couldn't kick anyone out of their office to build a real server room," he says. "They cleaned up the janitor's closet, took out the mop tub, painted and put down white tiles. But it still contained water and steam pipes and a large cast-iron waste stack.
"A year or two later, the waste stack became plugged somewhere down in the basement. The sewage backed up several floors until the waste stack burst. The resulting flood sprayed several hundred gallons of raw sewage into the little network room."
The IT manager calls the vendor's support line, screaming that this event was covered under his expensive maintenance contract, and he wants the vendor to fix the networking problem by cleaning the sewage out of the equipment.
"We all pulled out copies of the contract," says fish. "He was correct. We were obliged to fix the equipment when it failed. The contract was rather nonspecific about what constituted a failure.
"So I finally agreed that we would make any corrective measures needed to repair the equipment -- as soon as they removed the hazardous medical waste from the hardware. I pointed out that we did not manufacture ... that."
Silence. Then the IT manager asks for a complete set of replacement equipment.
"I agreed," fish says. "We would make a maximum effort to get him replacement hardware -- as soon as he sent me a purchase order for the full list value of the equipment."
In the end, the IT manager sends the purchase order. Fish grabs every available piece of equipment from his manufacturing area, loading dock and test labs to fill the order. It's air-freighted out that afternoon, and when fish arrives to install it, there's a newly vacated office to serve as the network room.
"I never saw inside the old room again," he says. "It was apparently converted back into a janitor's closet after it was cleaned. And we never did see the equipment from the old network room, either.
"Maybe it will turn up on eBay someday."
Click!
User at this museum manages to delete every name from the member database, and she promptly calls pilot fish in to help. "I was going to save my work, and I accidentally clicked Delete rather than Save," user explains. Usually, a dialog box asks if you're sure you want to do this, fish points out. "Yes, one did," says user, "and I clicked OK." Why? "I always click OK," user says. "I don't have time to read them, so I just click OK."
Right the first time
It's the 1980s, and this field engineer pilot fish has just gotten a phone call from a customer whose minicomputer is dead -- just before a team of auditors is scheduled to arrive.
"I began to ask him a few basic troubleshooting questions about power, lights, etc.," says fish. "His response to me was, 'What do you think I am, some kind of $#@% moron? Of course I checked that stuff already.'
"I reminded him that his office was about 60 miles away and that if I showed up and found the problem to be something we could have resolved over the phone I was going to charge him for the service call.
"Arrogantly, he demanded I waste no more of his time and to 'get my butt out here ASAP,' as I was costing his company money by sitting there on the phone."
So fish drives the 60 miles to the site, and begins his examination by looking behind the computer to see if anything has been disconnected.
"The UPS was plugged into the wall and the lights on the front panel indicated all was well with the UPS unit," fish says. "I noticed that a cassette player was sitting on top of the computer and apparently was plugged into the UPS. I checked the connections on the back of the UPS unit and found the power cord to the computer was lying on the floor unplugged from the back of the UPS.
"I plugged the power cord back in and the system rebooted. After spending about four hours repairing the damage from the uncontrolled shutdown, I was satisfied the system was fully operational."
Then fish tracks down the cleaning guy and asks if he knows anything about the plug being pulled.
"The only place I can plug my vacuum cleaner in is in the back of the UPS," cleaning guy says. "And up until yesterday, there was always one outlet available."
But when someone plugged in the cassette player, the last empty outlet was filled. And because the computer's power cord was the easiest one to reach, that's the one the cleaning guy unplugged.
"Sorry I forgot to plug it in again," he tells fish.
But when fish tells the customer what he's found -- and that he'll be charged for the service call -- the customer's response is a little more emphatic.
"Well," he says, "it looks like I am a @#$% moron!"
It's all the PC he needs
The company's executive offices are being recarpeted over the weekend, so it's up to this IT manager pilot fish to move all the bigwigs' computer equipment on Friday. Then he heads out for a conference the next week.
"I had instructed one of my technicians to reinstall the equipment on Monday," fish says. "During my third conference session on Monday, I received an emergency page from my system operator. I left the session to find out what happened -- fearing the worst."
Turns out the emergency is the company's president. He's furious that someone went through his desk while it was outside his office.
Why is he sure someone has rifled through his desk? "My technician had asked where his mouse was," fish says. "And since it was missing, someone had stolen his mouse. So therefore that same person obviously went through his personal items."
Fish knows better: The president's PC is actually an ancient machine that never had a mouse. But he also knows that it's not safe for any IT underling to explain to the president exactly what he's got on his desk.
"I told her to get a mouse from our dead stock and place it on his desk and throw the cord behind the credenza, because he won't know the difference," says fish.
"It worked -- and it stayed that way until we replaced the equipment two years later."
And don't miss the daily meeting on efficiency
This IT pilot fish is in the last four months of his job with a state agency. He knows he's a short-timer, but he still wants to do good work -- when he can.
But it's not easy to find time. "The IT manager was so paranoid about making a mistake that we had a three-hour meeting every day to talk about what we did the day before," fish grumbles. "Then -- I kid you not -- we had a one-hour meeting at the end of the day to wrap up what we did.
"After a month of this, I complained we had too many meetings. So we had a department meeting to discuss this."
Fish's final assignment is to design a database to track the agency's manuals and reference materials. "I knocked it out in three days," he says. "Then I spent the last four months of my employment working on the training manual. And I actually finished that in a week."
Then it's time to do the cover. Fish scans in an image of the facility director working at a computer, and takes the rough draft of the cover to the first of a series of -- what else? -- meetings to discuss how to tweak it.
"They asked things like, 'Can you move the keyboard over to the left?' and 'Can you put a book over there?' " says fish.
"I used a decent image editor and had to keep tinkering with the image. I even added some things that you would only see if you looked really close. Such as an earring stud on his left ear. And a tattoo on his forearm, blended in with the shadows, that said 'Latin Till I Die.'
"I spent my final three months and three weeks working on that cover page."
Someday My Prints Will Come
Corporate help desk pilot fish gets a call from the manager at one of the company's retail stores. The printer is giving an error message: Close back door. "I checked the back door, and it was shut," manager says. Try opening the back door and shutting it again, fish suggests. "If I open the back door, the fire alarm will go off," user protests, "and mall security will have to come to the store to shut it off." No, sighs fish -- please close the back door of the printer.
Don't Try This at Work
Sent on a jammed-printer call, pilot fish finds a T-shirt sticking out of the desktop printer, along with two rulers that were being used to help the T-shirt along. On the PC's screen: a picture of the user's grandchild. User's explanation: Her teenage son's friend had a T-shirt with a picture of his dog on it -- which the friend said he'd done on his computer. "Thinking it a good idea, she purchased the plain white T-shirt and fired up a painting application," fish sighs. "And the rest you know."