Sometimes, sharing just isn't enough

Pilot fish is the IT site manager for a small paper mill where he's responsible for supporting most of the users.

But it's complicated. "We use a second-party truck-management company," fish says. "And they have an outside company that supports their IT needs remotely."

And because the truck-management people have to be right on site, that means fish is responsible for the network, but the outsourcer handles support for some of the network's users.

And that's who gets the call when the truck-management users have a problem scanning images from a multifunction printer/scanner and uploading them to a Web site.

Outsourcer's tech can't solve the problem, but he comes up with a work-around: He tells one user to attach the printer/scanner directly to his laptop using a USB cable.

Then tech shares out the printer to the user who will be doing the same work on the next shift.

And it all works -- until the shift ends, and the first user takes his machine and goes home.

"I did say it was a laptop," sighs fish.

"I got the call after that, and changed the printer settings back to the IP port on the systems and opened up the blocked Web address in a matter of moments.

"Then I asked them nicely not to play on my network anymore."

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