While interviewing job candidates, one of this pilot fish’s favourite questions is, “Tell me about your worst day.” But when he asks one job seeker, the response is, “Three words: I love you.” Says fish, “I turned to the HR staffer sitting on interviews with me and explained that ‘I love you’ was the name of a computer virus. She was relieved that this interviewee had, in fact, not just proclaimed his love for me.”
Wrong!
“I’ve been trying to send an e-mail to this guy,” user complains, “and it keeps coming back saying the domain doesn’t have any such e-mail address. But I know it’s right.” Pilot fish suggests user call to verify the address. Irate user conferences in the would-be recipient. Fish asks him to spell out his e-mail address. But halfway through, user interrupts: “No, wait — that’s not how you spell it!”
Get the hint?
Pilot fish receives online survey for evaluating his team and his new boss with the assurance of anonymity, although it is to be e-mailed back to the boss. “When I opened the survey, I found two questions already answered,” grumbled fish. “The first one, ‘The team gets projects done well,’ was marked ‘Inclined to disagree.’ The second one was, ‘The manager has the knowledge and drive to lead the team to success.’ This was marked ‘I agree.’“
Hard concept
End user calls the help desk with a PC problem, and the tech’s standard troubleshooting doesn’t seem to help. The tech tells the user to “hard boot” the system, says a pilot fish on the scene. “Confused, the user asks, ‘What’s a hard boot?’ The tech says, ‘Push in on the CPU’s power button really hard and then release it. Now log back into the system.…’”
Not dead yet
After a custom application rollout, a message pops up on this user’s screen: We are dead. We are all dead. “The user created a screen print and handed it to his manager, who immediately escalated it to the security department,” reports a pilot fish in the know. Security is about to call the police about the apparent death threat when someone thinks to question the application’s programmers. “An emergency release of the software was created with a more meaningful error message.”
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