Computerworld’s Shark Tank is your daily dose of tech support humor and True Tales from the Trenches. Though the metaphor of “sharks” (end-users) and “fish” (IT workers) is sometimes labored, it’s almost always amusing, and a great bit to bring print-outs to your IT staff meeting.
Better yet, you can have it delivered to your e-mail daily. Good stuff.
Parks and Recreation Department IT pilot fish is sitting in his office, coding away, when he thinks he hears his name being called. He listens hard — and hears it again. He steps out into the hall, and figures out where it’s coming from: His boss is plaintively calling his name from inside the server room.
“I enter the combination to the door,” fish says, “to find my boss with his finger on the main server on/off switch.” He’s holding the push-button in — and if he lets go, he crashes the main server. Hard.
“Seems he decided to relocate the mail server, but hit the off switch on the live system’s main server instead,” says fish. “Then he couldn’t reach the keyboard to do a graceful shutdown.
So with the boss’s finger still on the button, fish sends the broadcast message to all users and performs the clean shutdown, he says — “once I stopped laughing.”