Monday 1st

It's the first day back at work after a holiday so I'm feeling refreshed and ready for anything. The minute I arrive, the phone rings.

"Hi, Billy Chippo here, how can I help?" "Hi, it's Frank from Accounts. I'd like to get access to Foxpro to write a database. I've been on a course and everything."

That's the trouble with users. They think that because they know what to do and how to do it we ought just to give them the tools and let them get on with it. I mean, where would the IT department be if the users did everything themselves? Doesn't bear thinking about. I run my little buzzword generator program.

"Are you sure you need Foxpro? I mean, it's very complicated you know. How are you going to ensure referential integrity? How will you check that you won't exceed the maximum number of table joins when your data has been fifth order normalised? How will you configure the transfunctional object despatcher to prevent corruption of the bit sequencing node when it's undergoing polymorphic overload?"
"Oh, I er..."
"Look, I'm here to help. How much data do you want to store?"
"Well, I guess it'll be about 20 to 30 thousand records."
"Right. Well, there's a program in Windows that's just perfect for that: it's called Cardfile. It's really easy to use, and because it's in Windows you can distribute the database to anyone without having to worry about creating a run time executable."
"Won't that be slow?"
"No problem. If it gets slow just put in a request for a faster machine."
"OK, thanks."

Excellent. Another problem diverted to the hardware support team.

I decide to take a stroll down to the coffee machine. Bad timing; the boss is there. He reminds me about my overdue report. Shame, it was shaping up to be a nice day.

I suppose I'll just have to engineer a diversion to take his mind off it.

I go back to my office and open the locked drawer where I keep all the diskettes we receive that have viruses on them. I select a couple at random and copy them to the boss' login configuration directory on the network. Next I fire up my packet spoofer program and broadcast a few RIP packets with the source address of the boss' computer, advertising it as a router with single hop access to all known networks. Within a few minutes his machine gives up attempting to cope with the traffic, forcing him to reboot.

I wait for the phone to ring. It rings.

"Good morning, how can I help?"
"Billy, I've got a virus on my computer!"
"It's probably nothing to worry about, we've had a lot of false alarms recently."
"Well come and fix it, I've got an important presentation to finish."
"I could, but I'm working on that report you wanted."
"Never mind about that, it didn't really matter anyway."
"OK..."

Another job well done.