This pilot fish pretty much singlehandedly keeps the technology infrastructure humming at this small firm located in a creaky old building, which apparently is still settling after nearly 100 years.

One recent day he gets a heads up that there’s trouble with one of the two monitors in the training room, where a customer meeting is in progress. It keeps going black and then coming back on.

As unobtrusively as possible, fish infiltrates the meeting to have a look-see. And just as he enters the big monitor on the left blinks off. Fish’s first step is to check the HDMI connections on the monitors, but they’re fine. Just then fish hears a click, and the monitor comes back up.

The clicking noise is just enough, though, to draw fish’s attention to the carts the monitors are positioned on. They’ve been shoved so close together that the one on the right is right up against the power switch for the one on the left.

And this old building moves just enough that one monitor is able to power on and off the other. A little physical separation fixes the issue.

None of this adds up to much, except that as fish is preparing to depart, one of the users in the room defensively tells him that he did try powering on and off the monitors to see if that would fix the problem. To which fish makes no response, although he is wondering how that would even be possible without pushing the two monitors apart and solving the problem by accident.

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