A Mechanical Job

(My office doesn’t have any on-site IT professionals, so one of my additional duties is to check our servers every day for problems and alert IT. One day, I notice one of our main servers has crashed, so I reboot it and send out the necessary e-mails so IT can dial in remotely and see if anything vital was damaged. This was the e-mail exchange.)

Manager: “Why don’t we have some kind of mechanism in place to alert IT as soon this happens?”

IT Manager: “We do have a mechanism in place. It’s [My Name] checking it every day and letting us know what’s happening.”

Manager: “Oh. Then I guess everything’s working as it should.”

(Nice to know everyone considers me just a ‘mechanism.’)