The new IT manager walks into his office. He sits down and goes through his desk and finds three envelopes with the numbers 1, 2, and 3 on them with the attached letter:

    Congratulations on your new job.  To help you out, I've enclosed three pieces of advice to follow when you encounter an intractable problem.  Open them in order.

The next day in the meetings he blamed it on his predecessor and told of all the things that weren't done right... routine patching left undone, documentation in disarray. Upper management grumbled but agreed to give him the time to fix it.

Two years later there was another outage. This one went on for a day or two and management was once again getting angry about things and so he went to his desk and pulled out the second letter. "Blame it on the hardware."

With that, he went in pointing out that they were years behind on keeping the hardware itself up to date. Upper management grumbled again but agreed to a budget that allowed him to update the hardware.

For a while, everything was smooth and then it hit... another outage. He went to his desk and opened the third letter. "Prepare three envelopes."