That reminds me of a call I answered in 2009. I was coming off of a 12-hour shift at midnight, driving home, when my boss (same one as before) called me to go to a customer site. I get there and find they're using two ancient servers, apparently linked somehow, running an OS called "
AEGIS" I'd never heard of before. The one server was only giving error messages, which I couldn't interpret because of my unfamiliarity with the system. However, our website listed "AEGIS" as a system we supported, so the customer, in desperation, had reached out to us and paid our one-time fee for instant tech support.
I called my boss (same jerk as my previous story) and explained the issue. He told me he'd reach out to one of our subcontractor techs, who was the whole reason we had "AEGIS" on the website at all. He only worked for us on a one-off case-by-case basis, and I hadn't talked to him for a few years at that point. Then I sat down with the manual. Let me tell you, it is sheer torture to try to comprehend a manual written in 1983 when you're exhausted and running on caffeine fumes.
An hour later I heard back from my boss, who told me the tech was not reachable on any of the numbers we had, and after some research, my boss found out he'd moved out of state the year before. No forwarding address, no emails to us, nothing. So, there would be no support.
By that time, by some miracle, I'd found something in the manual that looked like what we were seeing. I ran the suggested update, and then the manual said the linked server would also need to be restarted to get the system up again. I told that to the customer.
Customer Technical Manager: "No."
Me: "... Uh, what?"
Customer Technical Manager: "You can't restart the other server. What if it doesn't come back up?"
Me: "I mean, that's the only way according to the manual to get this server back up. Downtime should be minimal."
Customer Technical Manager: "No. I'm not going to let you do that."
Me: "Well, what else would you like me to do?"
And then the customer said a thing that has stayed with me through the rest of my career to date. I can still hear his exact voice in my head, saying something so profoundly dumb (coming from what is supposed to be a tech person) that I'd never heard the like before or since. This next line, I guarantee you despite my terrible memory, is verbatim:
Customer Technical Manager: "I want you to wave your magic wand and make the problem go away."
So, I continued reading the manual to see if I could achieve a second miracle and find some tech workaround to do just that. I was still reading at 8AM, when my boss finally had mercy and sent one of my coworkers to relieve me. I explained everything to that guy, and finally got to bed by 9AM. By 9AM, the customer's overnight technical manager also left and was replaced by another guy. My coworker told him the same thing and what would be needed to get it up again.
New Customer Technical Manager: "Sure, go ahead! Let's get the system up!"
And before I even fell asleep, my coworker got the customer up and running, receiving many email kudos from my boss and the customer technical manager. I got complained about for "not solving customer problems."
