
Re: James is a dick...
@Peter 45
The exact same thing happened to me.
About 15 years ago, while studying, I was employed as a coolie in a small municipal institution. My job was to answer phones, type out minutes, write letters, make photocopies, that sort of stuff. Since I had very little actual work to do, I installed a network, built them a home page, designed a client database and wrote an application that presented calendars, address books and database access in a neat, personalized manner. I installed all new hardware, cured their PCs of their inevitable ailments and fixed the printer three times a week.
It was all strictly amateur league, mostly patched together by blind trial-and-error, but it worked as long as I was there to mollycoddle it. I might not have known what the hell "TCP/IP-addresses" were, but I knew which values they were supposed to be and which parts of the operating system to poke, if the little critters got above themselves.
Then my coolie colleague got fired for being useless (which he was) and after a couple of months of me having trained his replacement, the boss decided the coolie office was overstaffed (which it was) and fired me. I tried to explain to the one guy in the office who wasn't a useless social studies-type how the whole bag of snakes worked, but I hadn't documented anything and he didn't take notes, so after a few weeks I had my former boss on the phone: their internet connection didn't work.
So being such a nice guy, I fixed that for two bottles of - admittedly excellent - wine, even if I found it a bit galling. Next time he called I didn't bother to call back.