To patch this server, we need to get someone drunk

On Call The Register understands consuming alcohol is quite a popular way to wind down from the working week, but each Friday we get the party started early with a new and sober instalment of On Call, the reader contributed column in which you share stories about the emotional hangovers you've earned delivering tech support.

This week, meet a reader who asked to be Regomized as "Bob" and told us the tale of his time working at a private equity firm.

"The owner was a singularly one-minded man and his word was law, even when his word was dumb," Bob told On Call.

Among the boss's incontrovertible edicts was an insistence that servers needed to run 24/7 for the duration of a six-month fundraising campaign.

"I pointed out that we would need some downtime to patch security problems and could do that overnight," Bob told On Call.

The boss was having none of it. "It was made clear to me that the clock started ticking yesterday and the 24/7 rule was in place," Bob wrote.

But the boss had another instruction: "Security was a priority, so the patches could be applied without rebooting the servers."

Bob pointed out that the two orders conflicted.

The boss shooed him away and ended the meeting.

A few days later, Bob had an idea.

"I befriended the head of building services and invited him out for a beer."

Bob did the buying and steered the conversation in the direction of whether a date for a future fire drill had been chosen.

"After two hours of plying him with booze I learned the date I needed: the next drill was a couple of weeks away." Bob used that info to hatch a plan to patch and reboot the servers during the fire drill, while the office was empty. He figured users – including the boss – would not notice the necessary outage while they practice their survival skills.

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Come the day, Bob made a show of dispatching two of his team to run an offsite errand. Plausible deniability established, those two worthies hid in the server room.

Once the bells rang to start the fire drill, Bob and his hidden colleagues watched the office empty – then sprang into action installing patches.

"The timing was really close," Bob recalled. But by then he had gone out drinking with the building services chap again. He was now an ally and happily found "faults" in most of the building's lifts that meant staff were slow returning to their desks once the all-clear sounded.

"That bought us more time before the staff came back and we got the job done," Bob wrote.

The boss never learned about the outage until years later – when Bob 'fessed up during his exit interview.

"He was fine with it," Bob said.

What's the best fib you've told to get a job done over someone's objections? Don't lie to yourself about not having a story worth sharing with On Call! Click here to send us an email, ASAP! ®