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Shark Tank: But it did kill that spam
7 comments- IT TOPICS:Hardware, Management, Networking, Personal Technology, Software
Spam is heavy at this mortgage company, so a consultant is brought in. He reviews six months of accumulated spam, designs a filter and sets up an antispam appliance that should kill 98% of the junk. Everyone's happy. Then it goes live. "On the first day, there's no spam, but the company's business has evaporated," says a pilot fish on the scene. "They didn't receive a single mortgage loan closing document. On the second day, minimal spam, no orders and very, very loud customer complaints." Turns out that 35% of the spam samples were for mortgage companies, so "mortgage" was one of the keywords used to filter out spam. Sighs fish, "The system was fixed, so they now get both their orders and mortgage spam."
No, Not That UPS
Insurance company's data center is moving to a new building, and this pilot fish is explaining to a meeting of senior execs that IT is about to relocate the UPS to the new location, so there will be no UPS protection until the move to the new data center is complete. Fortunately, power has been very stable, so the chance of an outage is small. But one VP is still worried. "Wait a minute," he says. "We ship almost everything by UPS. Won't this affect our service?"
Why Change What Works?
Support pilot fish isn't usually on call, but this time she gets beeped at 4:30 Saturday morning. What's wrong? asks fish when she returns the call. "The overnight jobs didn't finish," data center operator says. Suddenly, fish is fully awake. Did something happen? How much extra time is it taking? she asks. "Oh, it always runs over on Friday and Saturday nights," user says. "But the instructions say to beep the on-call if it doesn't finish by 4:30." What time does it usually finish? "Around 6." All right, fish says, please make a note on the op instructions not to call me tomorrow unless it doesn't finish by 6.
Power Play
This sysadmin pilot fish has a decade of experience, so he figures he shouldn't have trouble setting up a very high-end server for a rush job. But he can't get it to power up — the switch just does nothing. Suspecting faulty power, he calls in an electrician. "The electrician came and verified power with an ammeter," says fish. "He then flipped the switch on the far side of the power supply, and the machine came on. I had been flipping the system switch because I had no idea the power supply switch was there. The electrician promised he wouldn't embellish the story too much."
Don't embellish at all. Just send me your true tale of IT life at sharky@computerworld.com. If Sharky uses it, you'll snag a snazzy Shark Tank shirt! You can also add comments by using the form at the bottom of this page.
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