Anger management
This branch office manager has a nasty habit of hitting the speakerphone’s mute button and cursing when he gets angry during meetings. “Then one meeting,” says a pilot fish, “the videoconference room was the only room available. Once again he got angry, hit the mute button and hopped up and down cursing a blue streak. It took almost a full minute before his employees got his attention and pointed to the monitor. The headquarters attendees were all staring open-mouthed at him. He recovered very quickly — and never booked the videoconference room again.”
A turn off
A user who is the secretary of a distinguished professor comes to complain that her PC is extremely slow and for all practical purposes unusable. We found over 700 infected files. The antivirus software was turned off. When grilled about why she turned the software off, the secretary explains: “My boss wants me to open all mails for him and when the (software) was running it would not let me open all mail. Some attachments I could not open so I turned it off.”
Just like you asked
This pilot fish regularly receives lists of usernames and IDs to add to a system, so he lays down the law: all requests must be in a spreadsheet attached to an e-mail, not as text or a voice mail. “One person started sending me blank e-mails with attached spreadsheets for every single communication,” fish reports. “She was writing all her messages on the spreadsheets and attaching them to the e-mail.”
There it is!
Sales vice-president calls support pilot fish late one afternoon. He’s just returned from a long sales trip. Now he’s at home and wants to remote-control his office laptop from his home PC to catch up on e-mail, but he can’t connect. A quick check shows the laptop isn’t attached to the network, and fish fears it may have been stolen from the office while he was gone. Do you know where your laptop is? fish asks. Vice-president: “Yes, it’s in its carrying case in the other room. I had it with me on my trip….Oh, oops, ah, never mind.”
All charged up
Help desk gets a call: “User’s network charge card has expired, and she needs more minutes.” Huh? “I found her network interface card was dead,” says support pilot fish. “After I changed the card, she came into the office and asked me if I had recharged her card for minutes. I told her, ‘Yup, you should have enough access time for another year.’ “
Update time
PC support pilot fish fills in for a netadmin at a remote site and wants to confirm the backup procedures. “I obtain the key to the admin’s office, the combination to the fireproof safe and the lockbox key inside the safe,” says fish. “There I find the backup plan…a faded folder: ‘IBM Mainframe and Punchcard Storage Procedure.’”
QuickLink: 057448
