When all else fails, offer a catastrophic solution

Flashback to the early 1980s, when this IT pilot fish is working on a system for monitoring oil pipelines in Venezuela.

And that does mean in Venezuela. "A small team of us were sent to the western part of the country to install systems out in jungle, spread out over 20 miles," says fish.

"In the middle, the Venezuelans built a concrete bunker for our central computer, which every few seconds gathered data to monitor the whole spread-out system."

Aside from that, infrastructure is in short supply -- for example, the closest phone lines are in a nearby town, a total of three pay phones guarded by a soldier.

So to send data back to the server in the bunker, the pipeline-monitoring computers each have a radio with an antenna pointed at the bunker's radio tower.

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