Five Years After Quitting a Job, Developer's Former Boss Asked for Rapid Tech Support
TechTarget, Tuesday, August 19th, 2025
An On Call war story: a sabotaged Pick system, an emergency callout, and a fix that was plugging it back in.
In this week's On Call, a developer named Wade recounts writing software in the 1980s for a mail order business running the Pick operating system.
In early 1990, five years after he had left, his former boss called him in an emergency after hastily firing the clerk who operated the system.
The disgruntled employee had sabotaged it by unplugging the machine while it was printing the day's orders. Wade's fix was to plug it back in, after which he spent hours verifying data integrity and restarting operations, and he charged accordingly for the lost sleep.