It’s the early aughts, and IT department trainee gets the task of sorting through a pile of unlabeled recordable DVDs, reports the pilot fish who assigned him to the job.

“I asked him to check the DVDs one by one, discard obsolete data, sort blank media and label the rest of them according to their contents,” fish says.

trainee, permanent marker in hand, disappears. Two days later, he dumps two piles of media sitting on fish’s desk. One of them is DVDs nicely labeled with content description, date and number, using rather good handwriting.

“The other pile,” sighs fish, “was also labeled with permanent marker — 30 DVDs with ‘BLANK’ written on every single one of them.

“I guess they shall remain blank for the rest of their lives.”

Sharky will file all the identifying information off your true tale of IT life. So send it to me at sharky@computerworld.com. You can also subscribe to the Daily Shark Newsletter.