Awesomeness in Support

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It happened back in the early 2000s— the VoIP-based phone company I had founded back in 1999 had (barely) recovered from it’s near-death experience after the Telecom Crash, and we had managed to get our heads (again, barely) above the water. I had taken our postgres server offline for reasons, and — horror of horrors! — postgres wouldn’t come back up!
I know what you’re thinking, but you do need to remember a few things
  1. This was pre-AWS, we hosted everything ourselves
  2. We were really cash-strapped. Like, “making payroll for everyone out of savings” level cash-strapped
  3. We, literally, couldn’t afford a backup database server (they were expensive!)
So yeah, postgres wouldn’t start up — it kept barfing with some seriously obscure error involving a corrupted file header, we had passed our downtime window, and customers were hammering our cell-phones like you wouldn’t believe. If I couldn’t get things back up, well, my company was toast.
I thought I had a pretty good handle on things (postgres was kinda gnarly back then), but boy howdy, was I lost. The InterWebs weren’t really being particularly helpful here, and the postgres people I knew were just about as lost as I was.
Somewhere along the line, I found a phone number for someone at CommandPrompt on an email to the postgres mailing list, and taking a flier, I called him. Wonders of wonders, he picked up — turns out that he was driving back from a trade-show and was, like in a forest west of Lake Tahoe (or coming back from a conference, and an hour out of Santa Cruz. Whatever. I really wasn’t paying attention to that part ).
Over the next 30 minutes, the dude helped me work around the issue and resolve it, all while in the middle of nowhere, with a crazily spotty cellphone connection.
This really was one of the great “pass it on” moments in my life. The dude didn’t know me from Adam, was under no obligation to help, and followed up with me to make sure that things actually worked out. All without expectation of compensation, follow-on work, or anything. He saved my company, andprovided me an example that I follow to this day. I hope that I can do even half as much for others…

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