Company of a friend of a friend had an intractable problem with an impossible deadline, like, literally, less than a day.
Don’t remember the details, but I fixed it. Deadline next morning, problem solved, saved the day.
It’s midnight, on a status call, wife is sleeping in the next room. The IT guy, his Russian contractor, and “Management” (folks who called me in) are on the call.
The IT guy is SCREAMING at me because I hadn’t checked the code into his convoluted VCS. That thing was a mess. I told them early on that doing that kind of bookkeeping was not a priority. We could deal with it after the crisis had passed.
He was having none of it. At high volume. In the middle of the night.
I simply told them “You know, I don’t have to be here.”
This ][ close to just saying “ok” and hanging up the phone.
Good times.
The kinds of people who call you are some of the human beings you would least like to work with, generally. They are almost definitionally over-funded and under-prepared.