Help desk pilot fish is given a new laptop and told get a PCMCIA network card configured for an executive. He struggles for a while to load the drivers in Windows NT 4.0.
After a few days, the company’s IT director is getting quite upset with fish and publicly berates him because of his supposed incompetence. Director says, “Just use the ‘Add New Hardware’ program in the control panel.”
Fish, supported by his IT colleagues, tells the director, “It’s NT 4.0; there is no ‘Add New Hardware’ program.” Director insists the rest of the IT department does not know what it’s talking about, sits down at the laptop and tries for 15 minutes to find ‘Add New Hardware’ in the control panel.
After giving up, he sheepishly walks away, probably thinking another IT worker deleted the icon just to make him look bad. Remaining workers eventually get it working by obtaining a network card that has NT 4.0 drivers.
However, since it is apparently obvious to the director that his staff is incompetent, a few weeks later he hires a certified expert in Windows NT to work on the company’s help desk.
The new guy can’t resolve any problems himself and keeps approaching the regular workers for help because he doesn’t know what “Dr. Watson” errors are. Remainder of IT department is about to encourage the expert to look up the phone number for Dr. Watson in the White Pages, but fortunately they fix the problem before the expert embarrasses himself too much.
Fish is now happy to report that the IT department eventually gets a new director who promptly fires the ‘expert.’
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