Well, he IS an engineer

This pilot fish supporting an R&D group is in the midst of upgrading workstations to the latest and greatest hardware.

"Mid-changeover, one of the engineers is complaining that his workstation is too slow and his email client is taking 15 minutes or more to open," says fish. "I decide to bump the engineer up in the queue and get his workstation swapped out fast to make the problem go away."

And once the workstation has been replaced, the engineer's complaints go away too.

But a month later, they're back. Once again the engineer is saying his email has gotten incredibly slow. But fish knows that some resource-intensive applications, such as a 3-D design system, are apparently working fine. What's going on?

Fish makes a deskside visit and watches over the engineer's shoulder as he launches the problem application. Sure enough, email is taking 15 minutes to open.

Then fish tries to look at the inbox -- and notices the email client has a few extra tabs open.

"After further inspection, I saw the email client had 1,522 different emails open," fish says. "So when the email client was closed and reopened, the end user would reopen all 1,522 emails.

"I asked the engineer why he had so many emails open. He responded, 'I didn't know we had to close them.'"

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