Aha!

It's been two weeks since this server problem was reported at a remote site, says a pilot fish who has made sure he's not on the team dealing with it.

Mainly that's because fish has plenty to do, and the team is already plenty big. "Twelve people were currently working on it, five of whom had dealt with the server and the identical fault before," fish says.

But after two weeks of getting nowhere, the manager at the site messages fish's boss, asking that fish be allowed to help out.

I don't know what I can bring to the table, fish tells his boss. All these people have done it before.

But the boss decides to send him anyway, saying, "I don't expect you to find anything, but if anybody can fix it, you can."

Sure enough, fish arrives on site, is shown to the computer -- and immediately spots the problem and tells the team. They're suitably embarrassed, but fish points out that he's going to have to apologize to his boss, since he was exactly right to send fish out to visit the server.

Sighs fish, "The reason they had been failing to get anything fixed on the server was that they had been working on the wrong machine for the last two weeks. The first person who went to look at it went to the wrong server, and the rest followed him like lemmings."

Sharky wants your story to go to the right mailbox. Send your true tale of IT life to me at sharky@computerworld.com. You'll get a stylish Shark shirt if I use it. Add your comments below, and read some great old tales in the Sharkives.

The Best of Shark Tank includes more than 70 tales of IT woe submitted by you, our readers, since 1999. Which all goes to prove, conclusively, that hapless users and idiotic bosses are indeed worldwide phenomena. Free registration is all that's needed to download The Best of Shark Tank (PDF).