At this construction company, there's a regular need to document conditions at the job sites -- and it's down to a regular routine.

User calls to tell IT pilot fish that her monitor won't turn on. He checks it out, and sure enough, it appears to need replacement.

Pilot fish is hired by this company to support an application that tracks orders on a manufacturing plant's shop floor. It's buggy, but not to worry -- a new version will be ready in six months.

This IT shop rolls out new software for the company's call center, and doesn't skimp on teaching the staff how to use it. But not every user gets it right.

This engineering office is installing a new network copier/printer in its word-processing department, and that involves making adjustments to a PC with some very finicky software.

It's the old story: This small company's servers are mysteriously rebooting at night, and sysadmin pilot fish can't figure out what's wrong.

IT pilot fish is at his desk doing paperwork when he hears a desktop support tech across the way begin swearing loudly.

At the company where this IT pilot fish works, support techs have to supply a price quote and get it approved before replacing any computer hardware. But for this department, the quotes keep getting rejected.

"Having five quotes for new equipment previously rejected as too expensive, I realized this would be the same in this case," fish says. "So I decided to get a quote for secondhand equipment to save time.

This start-up company is going through the ISO 9000 certification process, and as this pilot fish leafs through a three-inch binder, she notices a page that seems to be out of place.

This pilot fish works at a telco that provides DSL hardware access to ISPs. Total number of users: in the millions. And when an upgrade goes horribly wrong, the mess is just about that big too.

User stops at the desk of this pilot fish and informs him that the mouse and keyboard on the user's computer don't work -- and fish has a good guess why.

The network is down on the shop floor at this plant, and the VP of manufacturing is furious -- but after 12 hours of effort, IT finally finds the root cause.

This pilot fish returns from a two-week trip and walks into an IT department meeting where the IT director is complaining that she hasn't been able to get e-mail on her laptop for three days.

This cost-conscious user calls the help desk to request that her laptop be reassigned to a colleague who needs it -- because, after all, she never uses it.

Programmer pilot fish isn't officially an IT guy at this government lab, but he handles local IT problems -- and when one user after another can no longer connect to the Internet, he has his hands full.