This site has hundreds of ancient reels of backup tape listed in its inventory. Finally fish manages to get one of the managers to sign off for their destruction. But when fish takes the authorization to the facilities manager, there’s nothing he can do. “We needed the storage room,” facilities manager tells fish, “so we sent those to the dump six months ago.”
What’s the hurry?
Pilot fish works for an outsourcer with a CMM Level 5 rating, which means very tightly structured processes. When a sys admin comes to install Microsoft Corp.’s Office on fish’s PC, fish asks him to put it on a secondary hard-disk partition. Sys admin says he’ll come back later — but it takes two days. “When I asked him what took so long, he said that was the time it took to get all the paperwork done.”
That explains it
Manager complains to pilot fish that the system for measuring sales staff productivity isn’t working. “Only one person showed up on this week’s report, which lists phone calls, e-mails, appointments and sales,” fish says. The reason: Though the sales staff was in the office, it was a holiday week. “It wasn’t the system that wasn’t working — it was the sales staff.”
Details, details
The PC mice this pilot fish ordered haven’t arrived, so he walks over to the delivery company’s office. “Lady asks what I’m looking for, and I say ‘mice,’“ says fish. “She starts walking to the back and says she’s going to listen for them.” It takes fish a minute to realize some people do send live animals by overnight delivery. When the clerk returns empty-handed, fish adds, “Er…computer mice.”
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