What's the hurry?

This IT pilot fish at a manufacturing company is about to take his Christmas vacation -- which, naturally, means he's still on call if anything goes wrong.

"One of the things our team leader wanted us to do was get our electronic data interchange transactions through a tracking system," fish says. "The guy who has been working with me for almost a year said, 'Just drop them into this folder and I'll transmit them and even process their acknowledgements.'"

Fish scoffs at that -- this guy has been dragging his feet the whole year they've worked together. But not wanting to make waves, he transmits the files to the appropriate folder, maps a drive to the link his co-worker has given him on a machine named SERVER3 and then makes a small change to the VB.NET program that handles the EDI documents that customers send.

Then he goes on vacation.

In the middle of his vacation week, he gets an email from the co-worker, who says he hasn't seen any EDI transactions in a few days. That can't be right, fish thinks. He checks his task scheduler -- the VB.NET script hasn't shown any errors.

Concerned now, fish tries to connect to the mapped drive. Windows won't give him access to it -- it says fish is already connected and can't go there. Fish emails the co-worker and reports the problem.

A day later -- yes, a day later in the midst of a critical situation -- co-worker replies to fish's email: "I changed the machine name to SERVER1. But the IP address was the same!"

Fumes fish, "I was about to waltz in to work and revoke his network login at this point. Never mind that, one, he was supposed to be keeping track of the acknowledgements coming back and, two, he never gave me the IP address, just the machine name!

"When I got back, I found out he'd been sitting on several weeks-old transmissions because of errors he was just getting around to. Our boss and I have both explained to him that if an EDI customer doesn't get an EDI 810, we don't get paid!

"I swear, there will come a day when he will storm into our office, complaining about his termination, and I'm prepared to read him the riot act for all he has put the company -- and the IT department's reputation -- through."

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