Safety first!

It's more than a few years back, and this pilot fish works in a computer room where the big machines have big disk drives.

"The drives had large, removable packs of platters," says fish. "They weren't terribly reliable and would crash, and so we'd replace them and save the bad ones in a pile in the back of the data center."

The night computer operator is a deer hunter, and one fall, he asks if he can have the dead packs. No one objects, so operator and some of his co-workers take them out in the country, set them up on hay bales and use them for target practice with their rifles.

Then he dismantles the packs, and hangs the most spectacularly shattered platters on the computer room wall.

Some time later, fish is working late one night when a woman on the housekeeping staff comes by with a question.

"She pointed into the computer room and said, 'Do those things explode very often? Because my daughter is majoring in computer science, and I was wondering if it was dangerous.'

"So I explained to her that no, they don't, and what had actually happened to the platters.

"She was very grateful -- and relieved."

Sharky will be grateful if you send me your true tale of IT life at sharky@computerworld.com. How grateful? I'll send you a sharp Shark shirt if I use it. Add your comments below, and read some great old tales in the Sharkives.

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