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A vexing voicemail
A user calls the helpdesk because she can't print from her computer, and the request is directed to pilot fish
"When I got to her desk, she was on the phone," says fish. "I heard her say, ‘Never mind, a computer guy just showed up.'
"It turns out she has a print job on the server that won't delete. It's not a big challenge. From the user's desk, fish remotes into the print server and determines that it will take a reboot to make the job go away.
He reboots the server, closes the session and heads back to his own desk — and finds there's a voice message waiting for him.
It's the user, calling to tell him that she's having a problem printing. But halfway through, she breaks off, saying, "Never mind, a computer guy just showed up." She'd called pilot fish directly, in addition to making a normal helpdesk request - so pilot fish gets a voicemail referring to himself.
Million-dollar overload
A company's pension distribution system is a heavily customised version of a well-known package. And it has worked fine for years, says a programmer pilot fish responsible for maintaining it.
But that can't last. “When the chief operating officer retired, he was the first highly compensated employee to get over $1 million in his distribution,” fish says.
“There was one problem: At that time, the file that was used to send the transaction to the bank could only handle $999,999.99.
“So instead of having $1.8 million deposited in his account, only $800,000 was."
After fixing the code, the company outsourced its pension distribution system.
Monitor not broken
"One day I was in one of my user's offices helping him with an application issue," pilot fish recalls.
"While sitting in front of his computer, I noticed a very annoying shimmy on his screen – it looked like every image was vibrating.
"I asked him how long that had been happening (he couldn’t remember). So thinking his monitor was going bad, I promised to bring him a replacement monitor.
"While I was sitting there, his portable fan was blowing in my face and it was really beginning to annoy me. I asked if he would mind if I turned it off.
"As soon as I turned the fan off, the shimmy on the screen went away and everything was normal.
"Did I mention that the fan was on his monitor?"
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