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Sometimes, asking nicely only gets you so far.

For one tech support worker, that became pretty clear after a grocery store manager spent months begging for a new server.

The old one kept freezing, and support had already told the owners more than once that it needed to be replaced.

But they kept saying no, so everyone was stuck dealing with the same problem over and over again.

Then one day, the server went offline again, but this time there was no brining it back.

Read on to see exactly what happened to it.

How a hollowpoint solved the problem: when a manager uses cowboy law to get a new server.

I work for a company that supplies Point of Sale hardware, software, networks, the works, to grocery stores all over the Americas. Have been here for just under a decade, and BOY, do I love my job. I am on the support side of the house, essentially the warranty.

This story happened fairly early on.

We had this one customer, a small-time independent grocery store chain with maybe three stores and a tight budget. They were on a contract that did not include upgrades to their hardware and were still rocking Windows XP “Servers” with at most 2GB of RAM.

This poor manager was plagued by issues.

We had been having issues on the regular with one store where their poor little engine that (almost) could would lock up running batches on their inventory for price management, and the manager was properly fed up with the situation.

His main file server would lock up, he would call us, we would Band-Aid it and recommend to the owners of the company that they needed to have a beefier boy installed. They would deny it every time.

So after about day umpteen million and three of this repeat issue and the manager begging both us and his bosses for a hardware upgrade… I get an automated alert that his server was offline again.

When he called the store, the manager sounded very pleased with himself.

“Well, he’s probably just rebooting it because it’s frozen,” I think. Boy, was I wrong.

I call the store, and the manager answers with an audible grin so wide I can practically get a tan from all that radiating smugness.

Me: Hey, [Manager], this is [OP] from [Company]. I’m calling because your server is showing offline for us again. Do you have a few minutes?

Manager: Oh, buddy, I’m glad you called. You’re going to have to schedule a tech out here to get this server replaced.

Then, the manager called it an “emergency,” so he scheduled a tech to check it out.

Me: Well, you know we need owner approval for that, but if you could jus-

Manager: Emergencies are covered under contract, right?

Me: Um… yes, sir?

Manager: And I can assure you that nothing you or I can do from where we are at will get this server back online, so this is an emergency, correct?

Me: Fair enough, sir. I’ll get someone out there ASAP.

The tech was certain that authorization for new hardware wouldn’t be a problem this time.

SO I dispatch a tech, and as luck would have it, he was already in the area, just coming off working on another store. I get him to go take a look, and he calls me about an hour later.

Tech, asking for me specifically: Hey, OP, can you schedule another dispatch for this store, emergency, to get their new server authorized?

Me: Yeah, I can start the process, but you know how these owners have been about buying new hardware.

Tech: Yeah, that’s not going to be a problem this time.

When he saw the photo, he understood what the tech meant.

Me: What happened? Can we try to get the server back online?

Tech: That’s not gonna happen there, bud. Calling it catastrophic hardware failure over here. I’ll send you a pic.

The tech sent my work email a picture, and what I saw was a computer case that had a little hole on one side and a substantially larger hole on the other side.

Opened up, the case revealed a penetrated hard drive and a shredded motherboard. Manager got his new computer.

Wow! It froze up on him for the last time.

Let’s see if the people over at Reddit have ever heard of someone doing something like this.

This person’s customer used old computer hardware for shooting practice.

Here’s what this reader would say.

According to this reader, it couldn’t have been a hollow point.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a woman who finds herself in a tough spot when a coworker reports her for the “policy violation” of having her personal water bottle at the register.

That’s a great question.

That’s one way to get what you want.

Granted, destroying the server was a little extreme, but there’s no doubt that got really old.

One thing’s for sure, the owners shouldn’t be surprised. After being told to replace it so many times, they should’ve just listened.

Ultimately, it’s a shame he had to take things this far, but good he got what he wanted.