This supply manager at a big medical center back in the aughts has a degree in MIS — and a reputation for requesting the moon, reports a pilot fish on the scene.

“Most of his requests violate corporate policies, HIPAA regulations or common sense,” fish says.

The latest trouble ticket from this user is a complaint that his computer is sluggish, freezing and generally flaky. Fish investigates, and it turns out the reason for the PC’s problems isn’t hard to identify: The user hasn’t rebooted in several days and system resources are dangerously low.

Which is no big surprise, since on the user’s desktop fish counts 32 instances of Excel, 26 Internet Explorer windows and more than a dozen other resource-hogging applications.

But when fish calls the user to talk about the problem, user has a ready response.

Yes, he tells fish, he knows he’s pushing the physical limits of the machine. But he thought he’d report the problems anyway, because he knew that if he had administrative privileges on his computer, he could free up memory.

“See,” user concludes, “I really am a geek and know what I’m talking about.”

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