By IT World Canada Staff
Shark Tank
Large accounting department was angry after upgrading from PII 400s to new P4 2.66 systems. They were complaining that the new systems were much slower than the old ones.
Pilot fish took one old and one new system to his manager to try to appease him. The new systems booted in half the time, mail opened in one-fifth of the time, and every application was much faster.
Manager arranged a meeting with the accounting department head and the president of the company. Accounting department head spouted off about how staff are rebelling, but was then shown how the new computers are faster in every conceivable way. He called in some of his staff to explain their discontent.
Two of the accounting staff were put to work on the systems. The girl on the new system, who was entering data – while the other one had not even finished logging on – yelled, “Look at how much slower mine is!” Needless to say, she had the observers stumped as to where this insight came from.
Pilot fish pointed out that the other computer had not even launched the application at this point, while she had almost finished an entry. She replied she is not and idiot and can see that, but how could the observers miss that when the other girl holds down the “L” key to repeat a character in her username, it comes up much faster than on her system when she holds down characters while doing data entry?
As she sat there whining about how it was unacceptable and how the accounting folks were all willing to quit
if the old systems were not put back, pilot fish adjusted the keyboard repeat rate. Not missing a beat after testing the change, she said she “should have known it was an IT programming glitch,” and was upset things needed to get to this point before IT would address their issue. She then said the new systems can not be trusted because “what else has the careless IT department missed?”
About that time pilot fish left the room. “Not sure what happened, but the meeting went on for three more hours,” fish said. In the end the complainer got her old computer back, for about a month – then she was fired.
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