I walked into our team’s daily 9 AM meeting a few minutes late and apologized for being late, saying “I just off the phone with our help desk. My hard drive crashed.” One of the programmers on the team said “Oh my” (that was one of his favorite phrases), as the project manager put his head into his hands and started rocking side to side repeating “We’re sunk.”

My manager asked if the help desk gave any estimate of when our hardware vendor would be in to replace the drive. I said, “The help desk said it would be two to three weeks.”

My manager pulled his American Express card out of the wallet saying, “Forget the vendor! You’re going to one of the electronic big box stores to buy a hard drive and we’re going to put it in ourselves!” Actually, it wasn’t in those exact words because of a slightly profane word and mentioning a big box stores by brand name.

Shortly after that control was lost in the meeting and I shouted “Wait! Wait!” After the people settled down, I asked, “What day is today?”

My manager looked at his watch and said, “That’s a good one. You got us!”

I had confided to a coworker about my plan and he thought it would work. That coworker thought this was the real deal this time, not an April Fool’s joke. Another coworker had his hard drive fail and it took about three weeks for the vendor to come in and replace the drive.

Ralph Hightower