I flew to St Louis once to remove a ; from a configuration file.
Ironically that might have been sorted out in minutes, without me having to move from my spare bedroom, had the concept of Webex or other screen sharing systems been available then.
Or ssh? Or even telnet?
Possibly, but that generally was never possible for our customers. Getting remote access wouldn't fly with their security teams.
It went something like this:-
When they ran out bit of our software it reported a syntax error with the config file. Every time we'd asked for the config file the customer had ftp'd it from the machine and emailed it to us and we found no problem with config file. Support were getting nowhere so they sent me to go on site.
When I got there I asked him to run it from the command line and it displayed the config file. Editing the config file showed the missing ; character. We added it and it worked fine.
I then asked the customer what he did when we asked him for a copy of the file. He opened up a new shell, checked the piece of paper taped to his desk for the IP address of that specific machine, ftp'd to that IP address, fetched the file and emailed it to us. I checked the IP of the machine we were ssh'd in to, it didn't match the piece of the paper. The piece of paper had the IP address of the corresponding Dev system, and on that machine the config file was correct, and that's the one that he'd been emailing us each time.
So, technically, it wasn't just flying to St Louis to add a ; to a config file, it was also to correct a single octet of an IP address on a piece of paper taped to a desk.
I was scheduled to be at that customer for 2 days to get to the bottom of this, having sorted this in the first 5 minutes we went through everything else he had questions on, including me demoing some of the newer bits of our software, but that only took about 2 hours. I gave him my cell phone number, told him I was in town for another day if he had any further problems and went off sightseeing (it wasn't worth rearragning my flights).
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As for a different modern life is rubbish story.
I went to look at a nearby flat that was for sale, just to see if it was worth it. Upon entering the estate agent mumble something about the lights, luckily we didn't need them as it was bright daylight, but I saw the instructions for them.
There were no light switches anywhere upstairs, it was all controlled by an smartphone app. So the instructions for the EA for turning on the lights meant that the EA would have to:
* Join the right wireless network
* Download the app
* Let the app 'discover' the lights on the wireless network
* Use the app to turn the lights on.
Somehow this is a form of progress...