Sharky's Blog Archive

Contractor pilot fish provides 24/7 hardware support for a defense plant, so it's not really a surprise when the help desk calls on a Sunday afternoon: An engineer's workstation has died. Fish calls the engineer.

This organization upgrades to the latest version of a Web-based application for accessing an enterprisewide repository, reports a pilot fish on the scene.

This hospital is installing a new system for sending medical charts and other patient information electronically between departments. And it's a challenge for this pilot fish and his team, because most of the employees know next to nothing about computers.

CFO calls pilot fish into his office, holds up his new Treo handheld and asks, "Can you do magic?" Sharky CFO calls pilot fish into his office. "Can you do magic?" he asks.

This expert user at a small branch of a very big company sets out one Monday morning to search the Internet, reports an IT pilot fish on the scene.

This big outfit develops custom applications for customers, and it's just gotten a great deal on a new software development platform. The mandate from top management: All new apps are to be built with this new platform, reports a pilot fish on the scene.

This vendor sells an application that runs on top of a widely used enterprise software system. And the application serves as the hub for lots of information coming in from other systems all over the enterprise, says a pilot fish who works there.

This manufacturing company replaces a lot of large, high-speed printers in the factory. "Instead of purchasing new ones, we decided to lease them from a printer company and let them worry about the service and upkeep," says a pilot fish on the scene.

Pilot fish at home calls help desk about a networking problem. "Eventually, the technician told me to unplug the modem and turn off the PC," fish says. "After doing so, I returned to the phone and was surprised to find the technician gone. Then I realized the phone was completely dead and had no dial tone.

This pilot fish helps a local entrepreneur start a small Internet service company. "After building the servers, configuring the software, designing their procedures and turning over everything but system administration to other people, everything ran smoothly," he reports.

You know this sort of user: the kind who blames IT for everything. "If I walk past her desk and so much as glance in her direction, anything that happens on her PC, lost file or otherwise, must be my fault," says netadmin pilot fish.

This pilot fish takes a job handling IT for a small business located out in the sticks, and he's got his work cut out for him. "Security is nonexistent," he says. "There are no firewalls, all the machines carry operational spyware, and I was willing to wager that Trojans, worms and viruses had already infected the machines on the network."

One of this company's sales offices does lots of teleconferencing with customers, so the IT department acquires two phone numbers with dedicated hardware to handle the volume of calls, reports a pilot fish there.

These IT staffers spend after-work time on old-fashioned role-playing games. "The type where you use paper, pencil and a bunch of different-sided dice," explains a pilot fish in the group. "One day, a manager from another department burst in and demanded to know when we would have a project done. We didn't know what he was talking about, but he refused to go away until one of us rolled a 12-sided die for the month and a 30-sider for the day and told him it would be done on June 12. I then asked if he wanted to roll for the year. He stormed off in a huff. An hour later, our VP came down to say he was doing next year's schedule and wanted to borrow some dice."

Flash back to the 1990s: This hospital is replacing dumb terminals with Windows PCs, along with networked laser printers and some new servers, reports a net admin pilot fish on the scene.

"Now one PC could access any host- and network-based application we had, and all hosts could print to network-based printers," fish says. "All the hosts could talk TCP/IP, so we standardized on it for communications."

But because there are so many devices on the network and multiple network segments, the team decides not to figure out how to assign IP addresses automatically using Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol. Instead, they'll do it manually.