Imponderables

About That Long

LAN admin has just returned to his desk in the "geek area" when this desktop support pilot fish notices something. "A few weeks earlier, the LAN group installed a collection of big monitors on the wall," fish says. "The monitors were connected to PCs that indicated graphically all the servers on our network and color-coded them green if they were up and red for down. I looked up and noticed a server was down on one of our networks. I called back to the LAN guy to tell him that one of his servers was down. He looked up at the monitors, and concern was written all over his face. Then he asked, 'How long was the server down before you noticed it?'"

Another Satisfied Customer

This IT pilot fish works for a small county office, and that means his job duties, um, expand as required. "I was sitting at my desk and a member of the public walked in to hand me an old motherboard and a greasy old trackball," says fish. "He figured maybe we could use them. Then he asks if we have an old hard drive we're getting rid of. I explained that we have to wipe them prior to disposal and that I didn't have any ready to go. But in the interest of politeness, I implied that we could let him know if we ever did. I asked him for his e-mail address. Turns out he doesn't have Internet access. Along the way, he mentioned that he's a computer programmer, so I asked him what languages he writes in. His reply: 'XP.' Oooookay..."

What's It All About?

Upset student: "I can't find my instructor's files on the intranet. Where is it?" College computer lab pilot fish: What's the folder name you're trying to access? Student: "The it folder." What? "The it folder!" Sighs fish, "After reading her course instructions, I explained that she needed to access the IT folder -- that's short for 'information technology.'"

Lifetime Repair

Pilot fish gets an off-the-clock call about a friend's wife, whose 2-year-old twins have just stuffed the DVD drive on her husband's laptop full of Yu-Gi-Oh trading cards. "Knowing it would cost a bundle just to have someone look at it, I told her to bring it by," says fish. "I spent a couple of hours taking the laptop apart to remove all the cards from the drive and put it back together again. Pretty self-satisfied, I returned the laptop and got a big thanks from her. I recently found out that my fix-it job lasted only a few days -- just after that, someone spilled wine on the laptop, ruining it. They couldn't bring themselves to tell me."

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