Sharky's Blog Archive

Working the help desk at a bank, this pilot fish gets a request to set up a PC for the information security officer. Fortunately, there's a spare network jack in the ISO's office. Unfortunately, there's a problem.

After this pilot fish runs a series of reports to make sure the help desk metrics are accurate, he notices problems coming from one department -- so, naturally, he sends them a note.

This pilot fish serves as system manager, programmer and operator for a relatively small non-IBM computer in a mostly-IBM data center. But one day, he's laid off.

This pilot fish is the tech lead for a group of developers at a major credit-card processing company, so when he gets a call from the boss early one morning, he knows there's big trouble. And he's right: It's a complete data center outage.

This pilot fish is helping a friend move her co-located servers from one hosting company to another, and the old company insists on having an employee there during the process -- presumably so fish and his friend won't do anything malicious.

This IT pilot fish starts work with a big company, and it takes a little adjusting -- especially when it comes to the red tape of a full-blown ITIL change management system.

Government IT office gets a call from a user complaining that her user ID doesn't work, and this pilot fish with more important things to do has to drop everything and look into it.

This pilot fish is responsible for the rollout of a product data management system for a manufacturing facility, but he also handles requests when users want a particular file from the system immediately -- and sometimes he tries to go above and beyond.

This financial services company is creating a data warehouse that will use DB2 for the first time, which means bringing in some experienced DB2 talent -- and that includes one guy who's competent technically but barely tolerates his co-workers.

It's the first real day of work for this fresh-out-of-college pilot fish, and just after lunch the boss drops an assignment on his desk. But don't worry, boss says -- it's not due until 3:15.

This pilot fish and several IT co-workers are engaged in an informal discussion about server and application upgrades when one of the engineers mentions that his PC's screen has just gone blank.

The finance department at this healthcare company has decreed that the purchasing process will be simplified. A new self-service purchasing application is rolled out, and it works well -- until the day a mystery delivery arrives.

The boss at this construction company has a habit of firing people at 4:45 on Friday afternoon. That's how this data center operator is let go -- but for once, she's not walked out of the building in the usual way.

Flashback to the 1980s, when alcohol hasn't yet been banned where this pilot fish works, and a development team discovers just how useful it can be in a big project in the data center.

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