“Joel!”

He knew that voice and that tone. Joel’s boss was headed his way and about to conduct another drive-by tasking. He turned to face his office door as his boss stepped through it. “Did you read Sally’s email about the slowdown?”

Joel recalled that Sally was one of the employees who sent him a message asking why her application was running slowly. He had just finished checking the low-hanging fruit—there was plenty of memory and disk space wasn’t an issue.

“Yes, I was just looking into the problem now.”

“Make it your top priority. Marketing has a deadline to produce their quarterly sales projections. Let me know what you find.” His boss nodded once and stepped away.

Joel sighed and returned to examining the reports on CPU usage while wondering how to describe technology to the nontechnical.