>It was a lot more fun than dealing with the "tough customers" that would want you to log into their production server and make changes.

Oof, yeah. My idea of "tough customers" is kind of the opposite though - clients who want you to do something super specific but you don't have any access to peek in on the real server and figure out what's going on, so you have to make them this elaborate guide but can't experiment on the real thing so it's hard to give exact instructions