This pilot fish maintains user accounts for about 1,400 employees of a county government, and he’s a bit nonplussed when he gets this trouble ticket:

Description: Recently added employee (intern) first name is misspelled. Should be Lesley instead of Leslie (see journal entry). Please fix her GroupWise and Active Directory accounts to reflect correct spelling of her name.

“In order for this ticket to find its way to me, it had to be (1) created by the original requester and submitted, (2) triaged and assigned to the network group by the help desk admin and (3) assigned directly to me by my team lead,” says fish.

“Apparently, it never occurred to any of the people who helped this ticket along that neither ‘Leslie’ nor ‘Lesley’ was enough information to uniquely identify the account in question.

“I spent 20 minutes trying to get someone on the phone to simply tell me this person’s last name, which allowed me to close the ticket — after 15 seconds correcting the spelling.”

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