It’s a few years ago at a company that prints mortgage documents for home loans, and this pilot fish is at the low end of the production totem pole.

“I and another fellow worked the graveyard shift,” fish says, “inserting the documents into daisy-wheel printers, confirming that they printed correctly, and bundling up the completed loan packages for delivery.”

When things go wrong — as they occasionally do — fish has to call for help from the company’s programmers, waking them up in the middle of the night to walk the document stuffers through restarts, uploads and other technical procedures.

One night, things get gummed up and fish wakes up the programmer who’s on. Programmer gives him a detailed procedure to perform at the server.

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