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I used to be the sole IT guy for a gov’t agency as well. Most of the people I supported had PhD’s and were utterly brilliant, as it was a gov’t research lab. I have had the “my computer won’t wake up” when the power button solved the problem, to the most bizarre issue one time.

I had travelled back to home for xmas, and got a call from one of our remote sites, where they had critical life health safety systems which depended on these servers. I had created a “fail over” server, and mounted it on the same rack as the primary server. I also had two disks running disk duplicating software, where there was always a “fail over” hard drive as a spare within the primary server. I got a call from the IT guy from a gov’t installation that the server had “blue screened” and was toast. I asked him, to reboot and on the startup menu he could simply choose disk2 to go live, as it was completely seperate. The boot menu had not come up on reboot, but he did somewhat remember that they had needed an extra hard drive, some months back and had “requisitioned” the spare in the server, seeing as there was a backup server, wiped it clean, and used it in another pc on base.

So I asked him to fire up the fail over server, so I could connect remotely to it, and make sure it was configured properly. He then informed me that they had reorganized the emergency operations center about a month ago, and had taken the spare server out of the rack, and had put it in their office, and figured they could just swap it into the rack if there was ever a problem. The problem was that this being Christmas day, nobody could find the guy to ask him where he had placed the server. So, nobody knew where it was.

The long and short of the story was that I had to talk this somewhat computer savvy person how to download the “DoD’s gold master disk image” of whatever version of server software we had been running at the time, which took about 3 hours. Then, had him install a copy of the remote control software we used, and sent him an encryption key, and I logged in, and all in all, I spent about 14 hours that Christmas day, rebuilding that server.

My favorite of all time was the actual Microsoft “HOW TO” page, that was posted by some fedup Microsoft tech support guy. More commonly known as the “RTFM” page. This actual microsoft page told people how to “Read The F****ng Manual”, and was not censored. It was posted on the old MSDN website, and was really served by Microsoft servers for some time, though it’s been said the guy who wrote it’s career was not as long as the time the page lasted.