That's Just Wrong

Quality department employee has been on the job for several months when she calls IT because she can't log onto the central manufacturing system -- she can't recall her user ID. "The user ID is the last name and first initial of the employee," says support pilot fish. So what could be wrong? "Investigation reveals that the quality manager originally gave IT an incorrect spelling of her name," fish sighs, "and she couldn't remember the valid incorrect spelling!"

Yes You, @#$%!

Sysadmin pilot fish gets a wireless-enabled handheld computer with lots of cool features. "I find out how to use a voice recording as the alert tone when I'm paged, and record a message that says, 'Wake up, @#$%!' when I'm paged by the servers," fish reports. "And promptly forget about it. Until I'm in a meeting. And get paged." Red-faced fish can only mumble, "My server is paging me" -- and beat a hasty retreat.

Dang Dongle!

This expensive engineering software suite isn't used often, so pilot fish orders three concurrent-user licenses. They arrive with a license file and a single USB dongle. How do I use that for three users? fish asks vendor support. "You install that license on each user's computer," support guy says, "and they can pass the dongle around when they want to use the application. Whoever has the dongle can open up three instances of the program on their PC -- though I'm not sure why anyone would want to do that."

But It Was Right Here

Pilot fish spends a day training a user on a newly installed program. But the next day, user calls to say she can't find it. "After some phone troubleshooting, I discovered there appeared to be no remnants of it anywhere on her PC," says fish. He drives to the site 20 minutes away and spots the problem when he walks in: User is working at a PC on the other side of the office. Sighs fish, "Much to my chagrin, I did not think to ask, 'Are you using the PC we trained on yesterday?' "

That's Why

User calls help desk: "The person across the hall got some new software, and I think I should have it, too." What software is it? asks pilot fish. User: "I don't know the name of it." Fish: Well, what does it do? User: "I don't know." Fish: What do you use it for? User: "I'm not sure." Fish: What's its purpose? Why exactly do you need it? User: "I don't know its purpose -- but I need it because she has it."