Aha!
Pilot fish can't log in to get his e-mail one morning, and he figures he needs his password reset, as usual. But instead, the help desk opens a trouble ticket and promises to send a tech out right away. "About 2:30 p.m. the tech shows up," grumbles fish. "He spends half an hour checking the setup and reinstalling software. The system still refuses to authenticate. Finally, he calls the e-mail guru. After a short conversation, he hangs up, turns to me and says, 'Your server has been down all day.'"
Completeness
It's the early 1990s, and this Cobol developer pilot fish skips lunches and works late nights and weekends to finish 18 similar reports that one department says are needed urgently. A few weeks later, fish asks a user how the reports are performing. "The user told me they only wanted a couple of the reports, but they had asked for all 18 because they were undecided which would be the most useful," says stunned fish. "They were running two of them and mothballed the other 16, never to be used again."
Tradition
Users in this purchasing department are accustomed to pulling data off the minicomputer, pasting it into a spreadsheet and then using a calculator and manually typing in the result, reports a pilot fish on the scene. "The new IT director sees them going through that procedure and shows them how to let the spreadsheet do the calculating for them. Their response? "Thank you, but how do you know the totals are correct?"
Brevity
Developer pilot fish and his cohorts can't figure out why their new manager keeps visiting their cubes and asking for information they've already sent him by e-mail. "We finally confronted him to find out why," says fish. "What's the deal? we asked. He rather defiantly told us that he refuses to read any e-mail over one line long."
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