Sharky's Most Recent Posts

Support supervisor for a retirement system is responsible for (among other things) making sure that tax form 1099 goes out to all pension recipients -- as well as the special machines to process the forms.

This company's IT staff is troubleshooting a very new product from a very small vendor, one designed expressly for a particular industry-specific management system. The problem that requires troubleshooting? The new program won't run.

Big call center hires this pilot fish to produce reports for management, and he's told that because there are so many reports to churn out, he'll be the busiest person in the office.

Contract IT pilot fish gets an urgent call to head for a medical clinic because the network is down. But the LAN is working fine -- it seems to be the clinic's Internet that's out.

Support tech pilot fish receives a trouble ticket about a multifunction printer that will only scan documents in landscape mode -- never portrait. That should require nothing more than a quick change in the device's settings, right?

Corporate-level support pilot fish gets a call from a user who's having trouble logging in to a particular application -- he has just changed his password, but the new one isn't working. But with such a simple process, how could he get it wrong?

This pilot fish works for a company that provides IT services to city governments -- which is a great business, except in cases where the client is a long drive away and has constant, inexplicable problems.

Pilot fish goes to work for a dot-com that really needs help -- the executives are complaining about how unreliable their phone system is, along with uptime issues in the server room.

It's more than a few years back, and this IT pilot fish has the on-call beeper for the weekend -- which really isn't necessary, because he doesn't get a call all weekend. But oh, on Monday morning...

User at this government agency calls IT pilot fish, saying that she needs to be able to access a particular website for a project she's doing with another agency. But that isn't as easy as it sounds.

The company where this pilot fish has just upgraded to a new email service, but one sales executive is having trouble -- and not being very technical, he has his wife call IT to ask for help in getting him logged in.

This IT boss pilot fish has a full plate at the moment with a large project rollout effort and a batch of high-priced consultants onsite along with the usual IT issues ... and then there's the drilling.

This pilot fish's company has a standard questionnaire for handling performance issues. But one otherwise helpful user seems just a little unclear on, well, something.

This IT boss pilot fish works for a small company, and his boss likes to keep certain problems inside the family -- such as his smartphone, for which he refuses to call the vendor when there are problems.

This data warehouse manager pilot fish is responsible for a set of vital reports that are run every night and delivered by email to his company's top execs, from the CEO on down. So when he gets a call at 5 a.m., he gets right on the problem.