Mad dash...
A timely one, I was working for a company that "printed the world's money", literally.
One of their clients, the director of a Russian bank, phoned up in a panic, his daughter was studying at Oxford and had to hand her dissertation in that day, but the computer had corrupted the hard drive! (We had supplied her with an old Olivetti PC as a favour, this was early 90s.)
The PC was couriered over to us and I had to spend the afternoon trying to recover the document. I managed to get most of it back, but there was a lot of "noise" in the document, queue hours going through the whole document, word for word, replacing hieroglyphics with real text. I also added some formatting and corrected spelling and altered a few sentences to make sense.
We printed and bound the document and got it couriered back to her an hour before her deadline.
I was promised a bottle of vodka, but it never turned up...
On another occasion, I was working for an oil company just outside London. A user called up, her Mac had frozen, mouse didn't move and it didn't respond to keypresses. I gave her the bad news and told her, she'd have to reset the Mac. She didn't like that. I told her, there was nothing we could do. An hour later, she called again, asking why I hadn't visited her... So, of I trot, over to her desk (in another building), waggle the mouse, nothing, mouse pointer didn't move. Usual keypresses, nothing, totally frozen! I reached around the back and turned it off, counted to 10, turned it back on and ensured it booted cleanly.
By the time I got back to my desk, there was a complaint filed against me, because I had taken so long to get to her, then all I had done was turn it off and on again - which I had told her to do on the phone. Luckily, it was only a short term contract and the helpdesk manager took my side, so no real fallout.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
