At first blush, it was a standard merger. Company U bought another, V, which outsourced IT to TLA. But when U requested diagrams and other networking information, things were no longer so simple. “Let’s just say that my dog leaves more legible information on a fire hydrant than what we got from the TLA people,” our Off the Record author writes in Bait and switch IT. The problem stems from company V being for sale long enough that TLA could feel the profit draining out of its contract. “We have a monitor in a prominent place with a countdown timer ticking off the minutes until we can finally remove these parasites from our wallets. I’m sure I’ll have another submission to Off the Record before that happens, though.” Technology Industry