software
The first job went well, but a pension remained preferable to rolling projects
ON CALL Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day, dear reader! And happy Friday, too, as it heralds both the end of the working week and the day on which The Reg delivers another edition of On Call, the reader-contributed column in which we share your stories of support jobs that twisted, tanked, or turned out terrifically.This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Roger" who told us he spent decades providing application support for a UK-based biz.In 2015, Roger's company ended support for legacy products and assumed users would decommission their systems. The company advised them to preserve their old documents and invoices on paper or in durable file formats, just to be safe.
Roger retired in 2021, and a year later heard that a large US-based corporation had acquired his former employer. "They immediately modernized the business by making the entire European support team redundant," Roger told On Call.
He therefore put his old job out of his mind and settled into life as a pensioner.And then, a few months ago, the American company contacted Roger."They had a customer in Germany who had used our software in the past, lost their paper archive, but still had their digital archives," he told On Call."Every single backup disk was still there and contained every byte of raw data with military precision. What they did not contain were the few insignificant items required to turn those bytes back into documents."Which was awkward because the German company was undergoing a tax audit and needed every last document to prove its affairs were in order.The American company asked if Roger could restore the documents – for a daily fee roughly equal to one month's pension.Those sums meant Roger was sure he could help – and proved it by remembering that backups of the application in question produced raw ASCII data that could be converted into human-readable documents with a print server running on bespoke software.
