I had a real problem of that sort, with a deadline.
A Russian student, daughter of a bank director, who was a good customer of the company where I worked. Our company lent her a PC to write her dissertation on and, on the last day, when she had to print it and hand it in, the hard drive "failed"!
Queue panic, ringing daddy, who rang the CEO who stomped on the IT manager who sprang up and down... We ended up couriering the PC from Cambridge to Basingstoke, where I was let lose on it.
The hard drive still worked, but was corrupted. I managed to recover her dissertation, although it was well junked up. A few hours in WordPerfect going through it word-by-word and correcting the corruption, sorting out the formatting. Then printing and binding, before sending the finished work by courier back up to Cambridge, it got there an hour before the deadline!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
