Full-Throttle IT
Late one evening, pilot fish is filling in on the second shift when a user calls and says his computer is running slow. “Can you shoot some high-end memory over the system?” he asks. You mean you want a memory upgrade? asks puzzled fish. “Nah, can’t you just shoot me some high-end memory over the system to make my computer faster?” Fish noisily taps a few keys. How’s that? he asks. User: “Yeah, it’s running a little better.” Says fish, “I told him I could only throttle it up halfway and that he should call back tomorrow to request a ‘full throttle.’ Three days later, the regular second-shift operator saw me and said, ‘You jerk.’”
Emergency!
User pilot fish brings an emergency request to an IT meeting: He has two servers that need to get into the nightly backup regimen ASAP. Somehow they’ve slipped under the radar, and there’s now no current backup for several hundred gigabytes of data. Manager: “I’m sorry, this does not meet our emergency criteria. I’m going to have to downgrade your request to routine.” Fish: “We have no backups! Routine requests take four to six business days. What if we lost a disk volume tomorrow? We wouldn’t be able to recover!” Manager: “Oh, that would be an emergency.”
Emergency – not
Frantic call comes in for support pilot fish: According to the office manager at this remote site, a user was just electrocuted by her mouse, and the office manager wants an IT guy there now! “Our IT guy drove 25 miles,” fish reports, “only to find out that the damsel in distress had passed out due to low blood sugar. But you know how dangerous those killer mice can be. User beware of high voltage!”
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