Users at this company are supposed to email the help desk so their tickets can be easily tracked, but one day this support pilot fish gets a phone call instead. It’s legit, though, he says.

“This user said she was calling because her email wasn’t working.”

The problem is that she’s gone over the storage limit, but she tells fish she has archived her older emails. Fish is a trust-but-verify kind of guy, so he checks the server, where he sees no evidence of any archiving from that user’s account.

He walks the user through the process of checking her archiving settings, and, yes, archiving is turned on.

But a little deeper into the settings, fish spots the problem: She has specified that the system should archive any emails she hasn’t read or modified in 31 years. That’s goes back a couple of decades further than the email system itself.

Fish asks user, “How long have you been with the company?”

“About five months.”

“I told her to set the criterion to one or two months and she would be fine.”

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