Nothing derails your day quite like someone trying to “fix” something they shouldn’t even touch.

Imagine finding out that the owner of a company shut down the Exchange server in the middle of its maintenance window because his email went offline for a moment.

How would you fix his mess? Tell him that the files were lost forever? Or would you spend the time restoring his database?

In the following story, an IT worker finds himself facing this decision and decides to charge the client premium rates for this one.

Here’s what happened.

Mark pulled the plug on the Exchange server during updates

Back in 2011, Mark owned a decently sized finance operation and often worked odd hours. He was in the office very early one morning (around 3:00 AM).

At the time, the company had a physical Exchange 2010 server running Windows Server 2008 R2 with a monthly maintenance window on the 2nd or 3rd Thursday at 3 AM or whenever it was.

Mark didn’t trust virtualization and never approved any of our recommendations, either, as if he were some sort of subject matter expert on IT.

When his Outlook wouldn’t load, Mark rebooted the server.

I was at a conference, so I was in the hotel room several states away when he called around 6 AM that Thursday.

“I can’t get into email,” he tells me.

I ask what happened. He said he was in the office early, and his Outlook disconnected. He knew it was really early and didn’t call me, but he figured rebooting the server would do the trick. I asked how he rebooted it.

As it turns out, his reboot consisted of pulling the plugs.

“I pulled the plugs, waited a few seconds, then plugged ’em back in.”

Crap. “What time was that?” I ask.

“Oh, around 3:15 or so.”

Mark paid a premium price for the mistake.

I spent the whole morning (missing the conference) restoring their Exchange database from the night before.

He lost a few emails, so did the rest of the office, and I told him never again will he touch the power cords on the servers, or touch the servers at all.

He got charged emergency rates because of his incompetence.

Wow! That must’ve been a very costly mistake!

Let’s check out if the people over at Reddit can relate to this situation.

This is how one reader would handle it.

Here’s someone who encountered something similar.

Yet another reader who experienced something similar.

According to this comment, a guy used to just unplug everything randomly.

At least it was the owner!

He would’ve been mad if an employee did something as dumb as this.

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.