Christmas: Pilot fish in IT operations is working the holiday so a critical mainframe application can go live by New Year's. Schedule is tight, and the programmers don't want to lose time the day after Christmas waiting for the work to come back from operations.

So the fish starts compiling and test-running job after job -- no problem. Gets down to the last set of 50 jobs. Runs the first one. It blows up.

Runs the second one. It blows up.

After job number 10 blows up, he gives up, scrawls across the remaining work orders "THIS PROGRAM MUST REALLY BE SCREWED UP!" in big red letters and sends the whole mess back to the programmers.

Next day he gets a call asking why he didn't just continue to run the jobs. Explains they were all blowing up.

Yep, says the programmer -- they were supposed to! Seems that final set of jobs was to check out the abnormal-termination options.

Oops, says the fish: "So we tightened the schedule just a little."

Sharky wants your true tale of IT life, no matter how it ends. So send me your story at sharky@computerworld.com. My Christmas week off will end (or abend) by New Year's Eve, but in the meantime you can comment on today's tale at Sharky's Google+ community, and read thousands of great old tales like this one from the Sharkives.

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