Who's Manning the Help Desk?
John Mullin, the IT manager at Theragenics Corp., a medical device maker in Buford, Ga., got a big surprise when he called the IT department at a subsidiary his company had recently acquired. The IT department at CP Medical Corp. turned out to be a single person -- but that wasn't the shocking part.

When Mullin phoned CP Medical with a tech problem, his colleague mentioned that he was about to graduate. Graduate?

Mullin assumed he was talking about higher education.

He wasn't.

"He was in high school," says Mullin. "I thought his voice sounded awful young."

Mullin didn't bother to ask if the help desk was located in homeroom.

This was first published in November 2006