It’s the late 1980s, and this pilot fish is responsible for a critical database that’s used for scheduling engineering tests at a major car company.

“One day we discovered the database was being slowly corrupted every couple of days, and production slowed to a crawl for hours,” fish says. “I knew I hadn’t done any major software updates in the recent past.

“We had hardware people on site almost constantly during this problem. Everyone was getting along quite well, even though the software people knew it had to be a hardware problem, and the hardware people were sure it was software.

“After tearing our hair out for a couple of weeks, my boss — and this is why he got the big bucks — said, ‘Didn’t we do a system upgrade a few days before this started?’

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