This sysadmin pilot fish doesn’t put much credence in the stories he hears about the IT manager at his new job — too far-fetched.

“He was known for putting the staff in impossible situations,” says fish. “He would attend planning meetings and agree to criteria that simply couldn’t be met, then tell everyone to just make it happen. Of course, the consequences were our fault as well.”

Then one day fish and his team go to the IT manager to explain the need for more file server capacity. They have the data showing current capacity, growth over time and the expected date when they’ll hit the wall.

IT manager's only response: “No.”

So the team goes looking for other options, and identifies files on users’ home drives that can be removed to increase capacity without impacting the business. They bring the new proposal to the IT manager.

His response: “No deleting users’ personal files.”

But we either need to increase capacity or reduce consumption, fish points out.

“No.”

No to what? fish asks. If we don’t increase storage or decrease usage, the file server is going to crash.

“That file server had better not crash,” IT manager says loudly, jabbing his finger in fish’s direction. “It’s your job to make sure that doesn't happen!”

Then he turns and walks out the door.

“I couldn't believe the edict,” says fish. “Eventually we went over his head and got the additional storage.”

The hardest part to believe now is that it took several more incidents before that manager was out of a job.

Just say yes to Sharky. Send me your true tales of IT life at sharky@computerworld.com. You can also subscribe to the Daily Shark Newsletter.