Why Yes, I'll Take That Commendation For Fixing The Thing I Broke

Who, Me? Today's edition of Who, Me? is a sorry tale of credit where it most certainly is not due.

Our story takes us back several years to when our hero, helpfully Regomised as "Henry", had taken a job working at a large, multinational bank.

Henry had been employed on the networking side of the institution and, keen to impress his superiors with both his skill and initiative, spent the morning of his first day there getting familiar with the network configuration.

There was a dedicated transatlantic link to the New York branch, which in turn acted as a hub for the rest of the US branches. All relatively straightforward stuff, and Henry continued his inspection until he spotted something odd. Compression had not been enabled on that transatlantic link.

It seemed a strange thing to not have enabled – doing so would surely make for optimal use of the bandwidth available. Money might be saved and transactions processed faster. He could well end up employee of the week, month or even year on his very first day!

Confidently, he enabled compression and took himself off to lunch, a job well done.

The glow of satisfaction was short-lived. Upon his return the office was in uproar: "They'd lost the link to the US, no one knew why, and it had happened just before lunch..."

The manufacturer of the hardware is lost to the mists of time. The memory of Henry's bowel-loosening realisation that his first day might well end up being his last day has not.

A quick thinker, he offered to help in the "investigation" – what could possibly have happened to upset the network so? After allowing a respectable period of time to pass, while those around him flapped like headless chickens, he made his, er, discovery ("not too soon as to make it obvious"), pointed out the compression setting and carefully asked if he might possibly be given authorisation to disable it?

After all, what sort of lunatic would go thundering through a bank's carefully crafted networking settings without proper permission? Not Henry. Oh no. Not him.

He reversed his earlier not-as-helpful-as-thought tweak...

And...

The new guy had fixed the bank's longest and biggest outage, and had done it on his first day! He was a hero! A commendation was stamped on his record in recognition of the save.

We rather hope the bank has implemented stricter measures in the years since. And Henry? The needs of anonymity forbid us from discussing what became of him in later years.

Suffice to say we'd not want to take him on in a game of poker.

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