Shark Tank: Showtime!

It's the early 1980s, and this young pilot fish is hired by a trade show company to support its leased minicomputer -- for bookkeeping, customer database, that sort of thing -- and also to serve as technical troubleshooter at the shows.

"This was when the desktop computer was becoming popular and there were many different brands competing," says fish. "All my programming experience was on mainframe computers and punch cards.

"However, the industry trade show, which was exhibiting heavy machinery, consisted of exhibitors with a hodgepodge of different types of desktop computers."

And fish's first show is also the first one at which many of the exhibitors want to use modems to stay in touch with the main office from the show floor.

Fish figures his "troubleshooting" will mostly consist of passing along problems to the telco handling phone lines for the show. But it turns out to be a learning experience, because so many modems have to get working with so many different computers.

And by noon the day before the show opens, everyone is connected and tested. The only thing left is the carpeting -- and that's not fish's job.

"Next day the exhibitors began arriving at 7:30 a.m. to prepare for the 10 a.m. opening," fish says. "That's when we started receiving complaints that the exhibitors' computers couldn't dial out."

And as fish starts checking the booths, it's clearly not just a few exhibits with problems. Nobody's modem is connecting -- and exhibitors are starting to mutter darkly about the trade show company's choice of a phone vendor.

"Most of the exhibitors also paid for a phone line, so I asked one if I could use his phone to call the telco to see when they were coming," says fish. "The exhibitor told me that the phone didn't work either.

"In all of the complaints, nobody had said anything about the phones not working."

Fish picks up a phone set to connect it to a modem line -- and the cleanly cut phone line comes out from under the carpet.

After staring in disbelief for a moment, he pulls up the rug. He can see the phone lines running from the exhibits to the rug, and the phone wires under the rug. And he can see the razor-clean break between them.

"When the telco workers arrived, they investigated and confirmed that the carpet installers had cut all of the phone lines when they laid down the carpet the day before," fish says.

"To their credit, the phone people had all the lines relaid and all the computers reconnected by noon that day."

Connect with Sharky. Send me your true tale of IT life at sharky@computerworld.com, and I'll send you a razor-sharp Shark shirt. You can also add comments by using the form at the bottom of this page.

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