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Soothed printer jams
Pilot fish gets a call from a user complaining about a paper jam, so he heads out with his tools.
"When I arrived, she said 'I was trying to print a report and it sucked up all this paper. I tried pulling it out, but it's stuck,'" says fish.
A quick examination of the printer reveals that several sheets of paper have been pulled in at an angle and, sure enough, they're thoroughly jammed.
But fish is able to use a box cutter to carefully cut away half of the paper on one side of the roller to remove it. Then he pulls the rest of the paper out from the other direction.
All that's left is to figure out what caused the misfeed, and fish soon spots a likely culprit: It looks like there's some grease on the feeder wheels.
As the user watches, fish reaches in with his finger to wipe off the grease. Except it doesn't feel like grease. He sniffs it. "What the heck?!?" he says. "This smells like perfume!"
User: "Oh, it's hand lotion", the user says.
Fish: "What?!?"
User: "It's hand lotion. The printer was squeaking, so I put hand lotion on those little rubber thingies to make them softer."
A matter of timing
A secretary for the company CEO calls pilot fish to relay a concern from her boss.
"This particular secretary had done her own thing with the phone system and office cubicle realignment without informing IT," says fish.
It turns out the president has noticed that the time displayed on his high-end phone — the execs' phones have LCD displays, which regular employees' phones don't have — doesn't match the time that's displayed on his PC.
"Can you make the time on our computers the same as the time in our phones?" secretary asks.
Fish restrains his first response, and instead calmly replies, "What is the basis of the time in the phone system?"
"We don't know, actually," says secretary.
"Our computer time is based on GMT," fish says, figuring it's better to leave out details about International Atomic Time, national laboratories and Stratum 2 time servers.
There's a pause. "Uh, can you configure the phone system instead?" secretary asks.
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