I was the VoIP debugger in my last job. Last minute trips to Tokyo, Barcelona, London. Happened about once per year.

I recommend you make yourself known if the situation ever comes up and you are in line to jump in. (Although you need to be able to figure out whatever the problem is.)

My go-to was 5 business days + weekend to where I could get the problem solved. My goal (and I was successful at it) was to solve in 2 and then have 3 days paid vacation.

I had no idea this series existed. What a pleasant change from the normal horror stories.

Usually their stories are pretty horrible for someone.

And the balance things out, the register is the home of the bastard operator from hell, clearly the inspiration for the IT crowd TV show

I know a couple people who did just this when I was working for Isilon, and did a little field work myself though I was based out of the Seattle HQ and only got as far as the burbs.

Soft touch customer care is a big deal and well worth it for these deals, which can easily run into the millions on a single support contract. You're not paying for the normal, you're paying for plenty of backup in case something goes wrong, and what he brought with him was more that he was familiar with the internal bureaucracy of the company to escalate things - or not waste more time on things that were easy.

Honestly, I think this was probably taxpayer money well spent - especially because it wasn't directly spent by the government, but only at its behest. A good support contract is valuable, and sometimes you have to test it on a nothing burger.

I was part of a large team doing an extremely critical database migration off-hours, we were all planning on gathering on a slack channel, everything was over SSH on AWS anyway.

The SRE working with us with decided to go to Hawaii. For purely practical reasons, mind you, since it's 2 hours behind Pacific time. On his own dime, but makes a 11pm maintenance much more tolerable, I'm told by those with some direct experience. Everything went perfectly smoothly, and I believe he went surfing the next morning.

I once worked with a person whose spouse was very good at fixing important industrial machines. Such machines were way too import to worry about commercial flights and expensive hotel rooms. A typical service call meant a private jet to the nearest executive airport and black car service to/from the factory.

C. 2003-2011 between contracts, I used to offer high priced on-site datacenter hardware, OS (incl virtualization), and software support on Craigslist for anywhere from SF to San Jose, Newark, and Fremont. Some interesting incidents and profitable times.

I kind of wonder if sometimes rewards programs grease the skids for these sorts of situations.