Techie lured out of retirement to support software only he remembered
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 software 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.
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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.
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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 customer 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.
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Roger found all the relevant code, got it running, and converted the ASCII files into PDFs.
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"Twenty years after last using the software, I still remembered the installation procedure," he told On Call. "Apparently retirement affects one's recollection of obscure print server parameters less than where one left one's reading glasses."
Once he converted all the files, Roger assumed the job was done.
Then came news that the auditors had refused to accept the data for 2013.
"Apparently a large number of invoices for that year existed in the documents I had provided, but were missing in the accounts data. The expression 'large-scale tax fraud' began appearing with uncomfortable frequency."
Roger rescued the situation by realizing that someone had imported one year's archives twice, doubling the number of invoices and confusing the taxman.
"I had to charge them another day to discover their error," Roger told On Call.
One of the younger people on the project casually mentioned several other archives were preserved using the same techniques, suggesting there was plenty more work for Roger to do.
"At that point I decided that retirement was still preferable to returning to full-time employment," he told On Call.
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This story has a bittersweet ending, because Roger told us that as he worked on the project, he realized the income would complicate his own tax affairs. He therefore donated his fees to the care home where he lives.
"That was very positively received by the home's management," he told On Call.
Have you been hauled out of retirement to support ancient tech? If so, make one more mouse click here to send On Call and email and share your story. ®
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