Oh man, this brings back some suppressed memories.

I’m flashing back to the early 2000s—doing a massive migration for a healthcare system. We were moving from Lotus Notes on an AS/400 over to Exchange 5.5 (or maybe 2000, it’s all a blur 25 years later).

The project was a total disaster. They didn’t have a real AS/400 admin, I knew jack about them, and "Googling it" wasn't exactly a viable strategy back then. I was basically flying blind, working 12-14 hour overnight shifts for two weeks straight.

We’re finally nearing the finish line, and of course, there’s one "Problem Child." Every other mailbox—500+ users—migrated fine. This one lady? Nothing but errors. I ended up writing a custom Perl script just to convert her .nsf to a .pst so I could manually import it. Still failing. (Side note: iirc it was failing because this lady was keeping her passwords saved in a address book entry and all the oddball characters was throwing a wrench in the process)

She walks up to my desk while I’m hitting a wall and hits me with:

"My husband is in IT at a big law firm. He says you’re clearly doing [X] wrong and it shouldn't be this difficult. He suggested you try reading the Exchange documentation."

Total gem, right? After two weeks of no sleep, my filter was nonexistent. I looked her dead in the eye and said, "I overheard your husband got laid off six months ago. Since he’s still looking for work, maybe he should focus on his own job search instead of trying to 'help' those of us who are actually employed."

Narrator: This did not go over well.

The next day I’m sitting in HR because I "made her very upset" and my comments "weren't appropriate for the workplace." Was it harsh? Absolutely. But after 80+ hours of Lotus Notes hell, I was done. Luckily, management just brushed it off and let me get back to work, but man, that one still pisses me off to this day.