Dude!

Dude!

Sysadmin pilot fish is sitting in his office one morning when a system operator strolls in and comments, "Dude, the computer's on fire." What?!? says fish. "Yeah, man, it's really on fire." Reports fish, "I bolted into the control room. Sure enough, the cooling fan was billowing smoke out the back of a desktop PC. I quickly yanked the power cord and the fan stopped blowing smoke. But I think that system operator definitely overdid it in high school."

Neatnik

It's a few years back, and this exec brings his Windows 98 laptop to a support pilot fish, complaining that it won't boot. "'Just all of a sudden,' they always say," fish grumbles. "I power it up, and it self-tests OK but then quickly complains that it can't find the msdos.sys file. From a command prompt, I perform a directory search for msdos.sys. Lo and behold, it's there: c:\junk\msdos.sys -- along with other files like io.sys, boot.ini, autoexec.bat. I asked how his system files ended up in a folder called 'Junk.' He said he got tired of looking at them and made a junk folder for them."

Fine Whine

Upscale user buys a pricey PC and a few days later brings the keyboard back to this pilot fish because it's not working -- and he knows why. "He was chagrined that he had spilled a glass of wine in it," says fish. "But he added quite emphatically, 'But it was a good wine!' "

Not Dead Yet

Computer shop pilot fish builds a new computer for a customer, installs the operating system and updates, and sends it on its way. "Three days later, I got a call from my supervisor," fish says. "Apparently, I sold the customer a DOA machine, and I was about to get reprimanded. She was in the showroom and furious that I sold her a dead machine. She said, 'It won't even turn on. Did you even test it?' I then proceeded to plug in the computer and she yelled at me, 'Wait! What are you doing?' I replied, 'Plugging it in.' She said, 'Oh, that gray thing isn't a battery?' I very politely replied, 'The battery has to be charged.'"

That's What It's For

User asks pilot fish to restore an e-mail that's been deleted from a shared group mailbox. "They need the e-mail that had a spreadsheet attached," says fish. "We go through all the work of restoring a mail store just to get this mailbox so we can restore one e-mail. After the restore, we tell the user that they should save the spreadsheet to the shared file folder, since that's a more logical place to be using a spreadsheet from. User says, 'Oh -- we can do that?'"

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