This pilot fish is on the payroll of corporate IT, but he's been assigned out to a special business unit that isn't exactly on close terms with the techs at HQ.
"I was their primary go-to desktop guy, and I sort of insulated them from corporate IT," says fish. "It was a very special group, and corporate IT had been trying to get inroads to them for some time.
"Some of the developers were complaining about slowness on their PCs, so a corporate decision was made to increase memory on all developer machines -- including the developers in this business unit."
Word comes down that the crack desktop team from corporate IT will do the memory installation. Fish objects -- he knows the reputation of the team that will be sent, and he really doesn't want it to foul up the hard-earned good relationship he has with his users.
But corporate doesn't budge. The corporate team upgrades the developers' workstations. And not long after that, fish is stopped in the hall by a developer who says she thinks something is wrong with her computer.
Fish follows her to her cube, where the PC is indeed making a horrible racket. He shuts it down and pops open the small-form-factor case.
It only takes a glance to spot the source of the noise: A hard drive cable is smashed against the CPU fan.
Developer tells fish that after the crack corporate IT guy installed the memory, he closed it up and turned it on, and that's when the racket began. But not to worry, he told her -- the noise would stop eventually.
"Really?" fumes fish. "I'm sure it would have -- after it ate through the cable or the CPU fan quit and the CPU melted. And that was a simple job: open computer, plug in memory, close computer.
"After that, corporate IT always asked me if I needed help."
Sharky isn't asking much -- just a story or two. Send me your true tales of IT life at sharky@computerworld.com. You'll snag a snazzy Shark shirt every time I use one. Add your comments below, and read some great old tales in the Sharkives.
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