It’s the heyday of Windows 7, and pilot fish is well familiar with the operating system’s disconcerting habit of reorganizing the desktop icons on login without warning. Sometimes users call about this phenomenon, but fish just tells them there’s nothing he can do to prevent it, and they’ll just have to live with it.

But one user in the Finance Department insists that fish has to come and help her because she cannot find the icon for the program she needs to run a financial report. When fish arrives, he sees that there are plenty of icons on the desktop, so he asks the user which program she needs. “I don’t know.” OK, what does it do when you run it? “I don’t know.” Well, what does the icon look like?

“I don’t know, but it was right there!” she says, pointing to an empty spot on the screen.

Fish explains that it’s highly unlikely that the icon is actually missing, and she’ll just have to open them all until she finds the one that will run her report. And thinks to himself, Try to remember what it looks like for next time.

Sharky hates when someone moves my stuff, but I love getting your true tales of IT life. Send them to me at sharky@computerworld.com. You can also subscribe to the Daily Shark Newsletter.