What’s the jankiest hack you’ve had to pull to save the day?

I don’t recall all the details any longer partially because what I did was fantastically difficult and it occurred more than a decade ago, but on a stack of Cisco switches in a remote data center, I had to figure out which port did a certain very specific thing with very little information on it. And I had to figure this out by process of elimination of all the other ports on the switch as this port was not connected correctly. All of that so that a “smart hands” person could move a cable around for us so that the phone system for a high-volume call center would work. I also had to configure the port and routing correctly with no ability to test it in advance.

The data center was in New Jersey. I was in Florida. If this had failed, the entire phone system for a call center would’ve been down and I would’ve been on the next flight to NJ.

My colleagues as I was doing this told me it was impossible and would never work. But when the “smart hands” data center person put the cables where I told him, the phone system worked perfectly and all was fixed.

Was treated like some dark wizard for the next year after I did that.