IT support pilot fish at a research organization gets a call from a Ph.D. candidate. The complaint: "My PC is slow."

"I walked down to her office," fish says. "The first thing I noticed was that her iPhone was plugged into the PC.

"I looked at what she was running -- Word and Excel, nothing unusual there. I fired up the Windows Task Manager only to see iTunes sucking up a fair amount of resources."

Fish asks the researcher about iTunes. She admits to updating her stored files. Fish explains how many resources that uses, and that iTunes is obviously the cause of the slowdown.

He also mentions that, while this isn't strictly acceptable use, he isn't going to say anything to get her in trouble.

She cancels the update and response time improves.

A few days later, fish gets another call: Same researcher, same complaint. Fish walks down to her office and finds the phone plugged into the PC again, and Task Manager again shows iTunes sucking up resources.

Reports fish, "When I pointed that out, she responded, 'But I didn't tell the PC to update.' Once you've enabled it, it becomes automatic unless you disable the functionality on the phone, I told her. We walked through the menus until it was disabled.

"I wish my predecessor had locked down these machines when they were installed. But when a principal investigator says 'Leave it open,' you leave it open."

Sharky is always open to hearing your true tales of IT life. Send them to me at sharky@computerworld.com. You can also comment on today's tale at Sharky's Google+ community, and read thousands of great old tales in the Sharkives.

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