'Let's just shove a bigger fan in there and see what happens'

IT people are asked to cram a lot into a working week, which is why The Register tries to ease readers into Monday with a new instalment of “Who, Me?” – our reader-contributed column that shares your stories of office mistakes and escapes.

This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as "Robert," who told us he worked for an outfit that scours newspapers and websites to find stories mentioning their clients.

"We found key words in articles that customers were paying us to monitor for. We would then cut out the articles and send them to the customer," Robert explained.

Sadly, business wasn't great. By the time Robert left it was almost bankrupt, and he gathers a fire sale ensued.

That strained financial situation meant the company was very keen on keeping legacy hardware alive.

"We had this one 2U pizza box server, and one of the three internal fans wore out," Robert explained. …