iiiiiiitttttttttttt

Oh, the amount of absolute destruction I've watched techs lay onto client sites...

One time, over a decade ago, daylight savings time changed and Microsoft coded some half-assed patch that created hidden fake timezones that screwed up the UTC offset of files saved during those two weeks.

It was afterhours and I was the on-call. The client, a major law firm and defense contractor that you have definitely heard of, was noticing that some documents had negative billable hours and opened a ticket. Once we determined that it was Microsoft's problem and I opened a ticket for development to take over the Microsoft portion of things, the site admins were trying to figure out how to resolve the problem before lawyers started wondering why they had negative billable hours.

They decided to just err on the side of billing too much rather than too little and just added an hour to every document opened in the two week window. It was easily thousands of documents in the update statement (they wrote and executed it, I just told them the tables and columns).

But the bug only affected documents that were open during the change over... so they generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in billable hours out of thin air.

The site admin sent me a $100 gift card for a local coffee shop in thanks for solving their problem quickly and I kept my mouth shut and closed the ticket as "resolved by site".