Sure, NOW you talk about it!

This company's infrastructure group is running a disaster recovery exercise involving a different site than usual -- "because, as everyone knows, we know ahead of time where disasters will hit," says a pilot fish on the team.

One reluctant participant is an IT manager who's notorious as a bully. His role: bringing his users online and testing their application at a certain time.

And it doesn't work.

Which results in the IT manager flying into a rage at the post-mortem meeting. The network was slow, manager howls. And mapped drives weren't there, profiles took forever to download, he couldn't connect to a server and fish's team wasn't communicating with him.

"The server connect was partially our fault," fish admits. "The application developer tested the server out and said he was done, and we turned the server off until we got a call asking for a status. And the mapped drives came back because one of his developers called and we realized there was a missing DNS alias."

But neither of those calls came from the furious IT manager.

When and to whom did you report these problems? fish's team lead asks calmly.

At that, manager gets even more angry. He yells that he shouldn't have to call anybody, that the infrastructure team should test everything out before he gets there.

Reports fish, "It was finally when we repeated what he said very, very slowly -- 'So you are saying that you shouldn't have to call anyone for problems you are having' -- that he realized how idiotic it sounded.

"His formal report was much more muted than his outburst."

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