When IT people go postal

Flashback to a decade ago, when this pilot fish is the on-site support guy for a moderately large post office. But there's just so much he can do. "I was authorized only to swap out various components for the point-of-sale window computers," says fish.

"Anything involving opening the CPU case could only be done by a contract technician from the vendor. The equipment was custom-designed for post office windows, and was not hot-swappable."

But one morning, an impatient window clerk finds that his printer isn't working. He unplugs his own printer, unplugs the printer from the next window and plugs that into his own system -- without bothering to shut either system down.

Result: Fuse inside the custom system blows, and the impatient clerk's window is useless for serving customers. So is the next window when that clerk arrives an hour later.

"I got a call at home to get in as fast as possible and get both windows back up and running," fish says. "Getting the second window back up was easy. I just shut the system down and attached the printer from the spare system.

"Getting the impatient clerk's window back up was another story. I couldn't get it working -- blown internal fuse -- which meant a call to the help desk, working up the food chain to Tier 3 and getting them to send a contract tech out to open the system CPU and replace the fuse."

Meanwhile, fish has to swap in the spare CPU for the one with the blown fuse. That means disconnecting the blown-fuse CPU from the rest of its hardware -- seven cables plus an octopus cable that combines eight or 10 other cables.

Then fish has to disconnect everything in the same way from the spare system, and finally reconnect the spare CPU in the window where the blown-fuse CPU used to be.

After two hours of crawling around under the counters, fish is filthy but everything is reconnected.

When the vendor tech arrives, it takes him 10 minutes to change the fuse -- and then another hour for fish to reconnect the repaired CPU to all the cables for the spare system.

"It would have been a 10-minute fix if the clerk had followed standing orders and waited for me to arrive," grumbles fish.

"If it had been up to me, he would have been given an unpaid vacation -- that incident wasn't the first time he mucked up the hardware because he didn't know what he was doing and was too impatient to wait for somebody who did.

"But I wasn't his supervisor, so all he got was a letter of warning."

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