Was wondering if anyone has come across any situation where you do your best to help users and in return you get a nice escalation from top level management!

Here's my story:

One fine morning, I was sitting idle, doing next to nothing, I got an alert from helpdesk people about a problem with an application running on a high-priority AIX LPAR (sorry for not being specific as I am not allowed to disclose the details). This application is actually used heavily by the bio-tech research fellows. The application was crashing frequently. Upon checking in-depth, I found there's nothing wrong from the OS stand point. I also found the problem was caused by one rouge wrapper script. But as a server admin, I had nothing to do with that officially. In the mean time, I had to speak to the manager of the research team and had to try my best to make her understand where the actual problem was. I assured her that I would contact the responsible application admin team.

Followed by that, I tried contacting that application admin team (which is a different IT services vendor than my company). I did not get any solid reply from them nor any definite timeline when they would be able to look into the problem.

I ended my shift. Still no reply from the application team. I came home. Gave it a lot of thought whether I should modify the script by myself. I accessed the server from home, spent a sleepless night understanding how everything of that application was wired.

Next morning, I went to office, saw my E-mail inbox hoping that the app team might have responded. But no! So I went ahead, made the changes that I thought should have been done. restarted the application service. Monitored the application for a couple of hours and called up the manager of the research team. She was furious. I politely told what I had done so far and asked her to check if things were fine. And yes, things were fine. But that lady was quite upset about our service.

After 6 hours, I saw an E-mail from our top level Service Delivery Manager demanding an answer as to why it took so long for me to fix the issue. Upon checking I found the research team manager had sent a "beautiful" E-mail to the top level manager saying how worthless people in IT were.

After two days, my supervisor showed up after his vacation. After knowing my deed, all he had to ask was "Why the hell did you even think of taking such bold step? What if something wrong had happened?". Being one of the junior members in the team, I kept quiet. All I tried to do was to help the research folks out and let them continue their work as soon as possible. But I got the prize of doing that.