When you work in tech support, you will often need to work with people who don’t know nearly as much as they think they do.

What would you do if someone told you to delete a customer’s entire database because they were going to migrate to another provider, and they still wanted you to even though you warned them that it would permanently delete their entire website and email?

That is what the tech guy in this story experienced, so he worked with his boss to just pause their services until the customer called freaking out, and then turned it back on and explained who was at fault.

Completely delete a client company’s website and email services? Are you sure? Ok.

I was T2 tech support for a company that handles my country’s largest ISP’s entire professional email services, all its DNS management services, and a large portion of its website building and web hosting services.

This company is tiny, minute, not even a blip in the radar, but has power that I will likely never again hold at my fingertips.

One day, a ticket comes in from ISP.

No big deal, easy enough.

Big client company is moving away from our proprietary email services and into Microsoft 365, or some such equivalent change.

This usually meant I got to help the client through the process of changing DNS records, migrating inboxes or just backing up emails, and even actually setting up some stuff on the Microsoft side (technically not my job, but the ISP’s T1 tech support was woefully untrained for anything even remotely technical, and terribly unprepared for most things merely commercial, and my company was awesome and treated me right).

So, ticket:

Wait, don’t remove their whole subscription!

ISP: Client is moving from service X to service Y. Please remove their subscription from the database.

Me: There seems to be some sort of mistake (which was very common). We remove them from there once the new service is set up and running. Otherwise, it will delete everything in their subscribed package, including all email storage, DNS records, and website. You likely want to change their subscription to not include email services, but keep the rest, since your Microsoft subscription doesn’t include DNS and web hosting management. And even that change only after they have their new email service set up.

ISP: yaddayadda confirm remove their subscription.

Me: Are you absolutely sure? This process is not recoverable. All their emails, DNS records, and entire website, including database, will be permanently deleted.

ISP: Request has been submitted. Remove subscription.

At this point, it’s been a couple of days since the first ticket, so I call my boss over (absolutely wonderful guy and extremely intelligent), and tell him what they’re asking me to do.

Boss: Alright, let’s show them they pay us because we know things and they don’t.

His boss is a smart guy.

Don’t delete the subscription, but suspend all the services that would be affected.

Keep those tickets at hand and expect a phone call.

If they call you, tell them to talk to me.

God that felt good.

I mean, I felt bad for the client, because their entire company basically shut down for an afternoon, but when they called my work phone directly from ISP (uncommon, usually just for emergencies) and the nice lady asked me what had happened with Client in that tone that says “I’m doing my best to hear all sides before making a decision but I am freaking out right now.”

This made it very clear whose fault it was.

I directed her to the tickets where I very clearly stated what would happen if I did what they told me to, and then told her to call Boss, I felt so vindicated.

Boss later told me to let them sweat for a couple of hours, because the process should have been “unrecoverable”, and then turn the services back on.

ISP was, yet again, absolutely thrilled with us, and my name kept coming up even more often as the person that solves things.

Why people don’t trust the IT guys is a mystery to me.

Let’s see what the people in the comments have to say about this.

This is the right way to shut things down.

Some people need to learn the hard way.

Always listen to subject matter experts.

Who needs common sense?

That’s a great name for it.

Never ignore the warnings of an IT guy.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.