Unless you’re a doctor or work for the lottery, it’s not everyday that you go to work and change someone’s life.

But when the IT helpdesk guy in this story answered the call of an exec, that’s exactly what he did.

However, it didn’t happen without breaking some rules first.

Read on to find out what happened.

The hug heard around the company

Early this morning, I was thrust a laptop by an angry exec, with him complaining that his laptop had locked up again.

Normally we have a ticketing system in place for any and all tech issues. However when an exec wants something he bypasses the system.

So I go through the normal routine of diagnosis and through my efforts I see that the issue is simply bad RAM.

I replace the RAM and take the unit back to the exec.

Let’s see how the executive responded when the laptop was returned.

He tells me he refuses to take the unit unless I have made 100 percent sure that everything that was wrong with it is fixed.

Internally I wanted to punch this man, but I held it in and simply asked him what other issues he was having and pulled out a notepad. He ran through a load of issues, and I took his unit back to my desk.

After going through and cleaning out lots of installed programs that had been used literally once and never again and cleaning out junk data, I found that a folder in his roaming was reading 12GB but was hidden.

I logged in with my creds and enable viewing of hidden or protected files – I saw that the hidden folder was from 2014.

Basically it was just a bunch of pictures and looked to be a temporary folder created by one of the old programs I removed. Some kind of picture manager or some such.

When it came to this folder, the IT helpdesk guy used his intuition.

Normally when we see personal pictures on the machine we are supposed to delete them immediately. Now no one ever does this, as we are not that mean in the IT dept.

Plus this guy was an exec, so I decided to just move the pictures to his desktop under a folder I created called Old Pics.

I took the laptop to him and informed him of the pics, telling him I left it up to him if he wanted them deleted or not. He thanked me for my time and I went back to work.

About an hour later him and his wife, who had come up to join him for lunch, came over to my desk. He seemed very happy and she was crying.

Now normally when I have nothing to do and a boss comes over, I stand up to greet them. Just the way I was raised I guess. I was not prepared for what followed and was totally shocked by the outcome.

Read on to find out what happened when he was confronted by the exec and his wife.

The lady wanted to thank me for finding the pictures and the exec reached out to shake my hand thanking me profusely before pulling me into a hug in front of the entire IT department.

I awkwardly hugged him back and he let me go embarrassed. My eyes are wide, flabbergasted and totally unprepared for this extremely out of character moment from this guy.

Barely able to hold back the tears, his wife tells me that the pictures I recovered were thought to be lost.

In 2012 their four year old son had died of leukemia and the pictures I recovered were taken right before his diagnosis at three years of age.

Because of a house fire a few years ago they thought they lost every last photo of their son. Apparently those were the photos I had recovered.

And this good deed from the IT guy touched the whole company.

His wife reached out to hug me and everyone in the IT department stared at their screens hard with puffy eyes as we were all not expecting this kind of emotional event today.

My boss came out of his office to personally thank me and forwarded an email chain to me ahead of a company wide email that the CEO sent out basically retelling the tale while naming me personally.

He threw in words about striving for excellence and the unexpected results of every day excellence.

I had to turn off my skype for business as the attaboys kept coming in one after the other. My boss told me to take my lunch early since the flood of messages was making it hard to do my job.

This is a beautiful story.

It’s nice that, in having a bit of humility while doing his job, the IT guy decided not to delete the photos, then made them so easy for the exec to locate.

He deserves every bit of positive feedback he got.

Let’s see what folks on Reddit made of this.

Many Redditors praised the IT guy for the work he did.

While others wondered if the experience changed the exec’s approach.

Meanwhile, this dad could relate to the exec’s situation.

Initially the exec seemed grouchy and pushy – but when you know more about his situation, you can understand why he might be less-than-happy in his everyday life.

He’s lucky to have such a dedicated and empathetic employee, who simply by listening to his initiative didn’t delete these priceless images.

What a good guy.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.