SHARK TANK

Durable desktop

It's the 1990s, and this pilot fish gets a job supporting networks and fixing PCs for a manufacturing company.

The only problem: There's no place for fish to work.

"The 'datacentre' consisted of a corner of their telephone room, which also held a large UPS system and cooling equipment and was way too noisy," fish says.

"However, there was an empty office on the other side of the datacentre, and I managed to talk the plant supervisor into having a doorway cut into the adjoining wall.

"Now I had my work area, but I didn't have a proper desk."

Fish contacts the plant supervisor, who sends up a guy who's building some custom cabinets in another part of the facility. The very friendly cabinet maker tells fish he has some "heavy duty" wood left over from the job he'd been hired to do, and he'd build fish a really nice work bench if fish will repair his home PC.

Fair enough, says fish.

What a desk! It's beautifully crafted, with a monitor stand on top that will hold four monitors.

And as fish quickly discovers, the custom-built desk is made of solid wood that measures an inch thick — all except for the top, which is a two-inch-thick slab of wood.

"The thing was very heavy" fish says. "After 14 years, it's still in the same place — no one has figured out how to move this lovely beast without tearing out a wall!"

Back-up blues

A user came in and complained to me that someone deleted some files on the network share, fish recalls.

"She asked that I restore the files from backup. Well, when I tried to restore from tape, I discovered that it's been months since that server completed a 100% backup. I don't have to restore often and I'm not assigned to backup management, so I was unaware of the issue. Consequently, the files were not available on our two week tape stack, so the files were lost. I apologised and all was good. "Oh well," she said.

"I informed my boss that we should either clean up the share or get a bigger tape backup system, since this was not the first time we capped out the tape backup. He made some remarks about cost and users being responsible with their data."

Shortly afterwards, fish gets an email from his boss asking the group if anyone has copies of a certain folder, because there was something really important in it that he needed. It turns out he accidentally deleted the folder and he can't recover it, because the tape backup wasn't big enough to get his data.