It’s the early ’90s, and this pilot fish is the sole server, desktop and network guy at a startup that’s developing hardware and software for consumer Ethernet switches. In fact, he’s employee No. 6; Nos. 1, 2 and 3 are the co-founders, and No. 4 is the brother of one of the co-founders. Before the company can hit 40 employees, it’s acquired.

Some time after that, fish is accosted at his desk one day by 10 or so people wanting to know why their documents and compiles have crashed. Fish looks into it and discovers that it’s the brother, who has always acted as if he can do whatever he wants on the company network because his brother owns the place. Except, of course, that’s no longer true. In any case, when the brother found he couldn’t access the server, he let himself into the server room and hard-rebooted the server to “fix it.”

After fish explains to brother that he has to call him when he has a problem, fish starts troubleshooting on brother’s machine, and it doesn’t take long to find the problem: His LAN cable had gone bad.

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