The most fun interaction I’ve ever had as an IT person was being on vacation and getting called by someone needing help. Now, normally, it’s not fun being called on vacation but this user was very nice and we knew each other outside of work a bit so I didn’t mind.

She asked me how to set up her VPN and do some other stuff, since at this company it was all manual at the time. I walked her through it all, even giving her the IPs of some DNS servers she could use, and going step by step through a fairly complex procedure to get it all verified and working, including RDP access to several machines.

At the end, she asked me if I could remote in and look at a hard-to-describe problem with her email. I said, “Remote in? I don’t even have a computer with me and I’m 20 miles from anything.” (I was deep in the Appalachians, was lucky to even have cell signal.)

Complete silence for a moment or two and then she said, “Wait, you walked me through at least a 30 minute setup process and gave me several different IP addresses and you did that from memory?”

“Uh, yeah? That kinda stuff is just natural to me.”

Then she said that she’d see me when I got back, we said our goodbyes, and hung up. I think I blew her mind a little bit. In fact, I know I did as she told other people that story several years later.