A Shark Tank Story

Many thanks to Trillian for sending this my way. It comes from ComputerWorld's excellent Shark Tank series. This one struck a very funny chord. Even if you don't work in technology, the humanity of these stories is still funny as heck.

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Shark Tank: Sometimes the quickest solution is the best one

This pilot fish is the lone IT person at a small manufacturing company. So when the music-on-hold system stops working, you know who has to deal with it.

"The music-on-hold player continuously replayed a CD and fed into the simple phone system we were using," fish says. "Eventually the player broke. Since I had a spare PC in my office, I wired the audio jack on the PC to the phone system, ripped the CD and set the media player to continuous replay.

"I gave myself a pat on the back for coming up with an immediate solution and made a mental note to order a new player the next time I made an equipment purchase."

A few days later, a buddy from another department drops by fish's office so they can spend lunchtime blasting each other in a multiplayer computer game.

"He used the spare PC in my office and I used my workstation," says fish. "We were well into destroying each other when the CEO's secretary frantically burst into my office, scared, panicking.

"She explained in horror that our music on hold had turned into death screams and hellish demonic noises!"

Fish knows instantly what the problem is -- the game's audio was playing on the music-on-hold system -- and he takes instant action. He leaps up, tears the old music-on-hold player from the wall, throws it to the floor and stomps on it.

Meanwhile, his friend quits out of the game on the spare PC, and the music-on-hold system goes silent.

"They bought a new player that day," fish says. "And for a long time, you could still hear them talk about the possessed music-on-hold player."