SHARK TANK
Computerworld is New Zealand's only specialised information systems fortnightly. Subscribe now for $100 (23 issues) and save more than 37% off the cover price!
Smoke on the desktop
Sysadmin pilot fish is sitting in his office one morning when a system operator strolls in and comments, "Dude, the computer's on fire." What?!? says fish. "Yeah, man, it's really on fire." Reports fish, "I bolted into the control room. Sure enough, the cooling fan was billowing smoke out the back of a desktop PC. I quickly yanked the power cord and the fan stopped blowing smoke. The system operator definitey overdid the use of worlds like 'dude' and 'man'".
Systemic junk
It's a few years back, and an exec brings his Windows 98 laptop to support pilot fish, complaining that it won't boot. "I power it up, and it self-tests OK but then quickly complains that it can't find the msdos.sys file", fish recalls. "From a command prompt, I perform a directory search for msdos.sys. Lo and behold, it's there: c:\junk\msdos.sys — along with other files like io.sys, boot.ini, autoexec.bat. I asked how his system files ended up in a folder called 'Junk.' He said he got tired of looking at them and made a junk folder for them."
Not Dead Yet
Computer shop pilot fish builds a new computer for a customer, installs the operating system and updates, and sends it on its way. "Three days later, I got a call from my supervisor," fish says. "Apparently, I sold the customer a DOA machine, and I was about to get reprimanded. She was in the showroom and furious that I sold her a dead machine. She said, 'It won't even turn on. Did you even test it?' I then proceeded to plug in the computer and she yelled at me, 'Wait! What are you doing?' I replied, 'Plugging it in.' She said, 'Oh, that gray thing isn't a battery?' I very politely replied, 'The battery has to be charged.'"
That's What It's For
User asks pilot fish to restore an email that's been deleted from a shared group mailbox. "They need the email that had a spreadsheet attached," says fish. "We go through all the work of restoring a mail store just to get this mailbox so we can restore one email. After the restore, we tell the user that they should save the spreadsheet to the shared file folder, since that's a more logical place to be using a spreadsheet from. User says, 'Oh — we can do that?'"

Computerworld NZ has now reached LinkedIn! Join to expand your networks and meet others interested in information systems.







