The bigger the problem...the LESS you should do?

IT support pilot fish at a university gets a routine trouble call: This professor's laptop has gotten very slow -- and fish thinks a lack of disk space is the likely issue.

"But I told him I'd have to run some tests," says fish. "His field of study involved sound and, as expected, he had a huge collection of sound files. And his usual email heap dated back many years, with lots of picture attachments.

"Still, all that didn't add up to a problem. I'd specified the machine knowing this prof would store all this stuff. So what was the issue?"

Once fish recovers some free space, he ranks the folders by size -- and discovers that the biggest ones have some eye-popping names that appear to identify specialized sorts of smut.

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