Pilot fish and his team are called upon to investigate a large computer that’s running slowly. The problem: users who are just abandoning their sessions on the big machine instead of quitting properly.

“We wrote a script that would detect the rogue sessions and kill them off,” fish says. “Then we would report to the manager the names of the users who did not exit cleanly from the session, and the manager would have words with them.”

That’s the plan, anyway. Fish warns users that the script has been written and what it’s for.

And it works. On the first day the script goes live, it catches a rogue session — which was left hanging by the manager.

Manager explains that he was just testing the script.

On the third day, the script catches another rogue session belonging to the manager, who explains again that it was a test.

By the time the script has been live for a week and a half, fish has spotted a definite pattern.

“After 10 days, we caught the manager four times and no other member of staff,” says fish.

“The script is still — according to the manager — in testing. Until we catch a normal member of staff, it will remain as being tested.”

This is not a test. Sharky really does want your true tale of IT life. Send it to me at sharky@computerworld.com. You can also subscribe to the Daily Shark Newsletter and read some great old tales in the Sharkives.