Employee complies with client's disastrous request to show them the consequences

Most people believe the work should be left to professionals or people who know their job the best. Their judgment shouldn't be second-guessed on most accounts. But sometimes, a person might fail to understand the consequences of their actions even if the former explains it to them. A similar thing happened with an employee, u/PineScentedSewerRat, who was forced to listen to a client even when they were wrong to make them understand what would happen if things were done in their way.

"I was T2 tech support for a company that handles my country's largest ISP's entire professional email services, all its DNS management services, and a large portion of its website building and web hosting services," the person wrote. "This company is tiny, minute, not even a blip in the radar, but has power that I will likely never again hold at my fingertips." They continued, "One day, a ticket comes in from ISP. The big client company is moving away from our proprietary email services and into Microsoft 365 or some such equivalent change. This usually meant I got to help the client through the process of changing DNS records, migrating inboxes or just backing up emails, and even actually setting up some stuff on the Microsoft side."

Part of it was not the employee's job, but ISP's staff was untrained and unprepared and the person's company treated them quite well, so they were willing to go the extra mile for them. "The client is moving from service X to service Y. Please remove their subscription from the database," ISP told the employee. The person explained, "There seems to be some sort of mistake (which was very common). We remove them from there once the new service is set up and running. Otherwise, it will delete everything in their subscribed package, including all email storage, DNS records and website. You likely want to change their subscription not to include email services, but keep the rest since your Microsoft subscription doesn't include DNS and web hosting management. That change only after they have their new email service set up."

The client urged the person that it was confirmed and they could go ahead and remove the subscription. "Are you absolutely sure? This process is not recoverable. All their emails, DNS records and entire websites, including the database, will be permanently deleted," the employee pointed out. The person on the other end still told them to go on. "At this point, it's been a couple of days since the first ticket, so I call my boss over (an absolutely wonderful guy and extremely intelligent) and tell him what they're asking me to do," the person went on. "Alright, let's show them they pay us because we know things and they don't. Don't delete the subscription, but suspend all the services that would be affected. Keep those tickets at hand and expect a phone call. If they call you, tell them to talk to me," the boss replied.

The person felt bad for the client but did what the boss said and explained to the client's representative what happened. "I felt so vindicated. Boss later told me to let them sweat for a couple of hours because the process should have been 'unrecoverable' and then turn the services back on," the employee recounted. "ISP was, yet again, absolutely thrilled with us and my name kept coming up even more often as the person that solves things." People took to the comments to share their opinions. u/enjaydee said, "The good old scream test. Never actually delete anything just shut it down or disable it first. Wait to see if anyone screams, then turn it back on."

u/theproudheretic joked, "Oh, we haven't needed widget x in 6 months, get rid of them! Why don't we have any widget x? Nothing works without a machine that needs a widget x!" u/morgan423 shared, "The main lesson is, as always, that when a subject matter expert learns of your plans and then says, 'Wait, are you sure you want to do that,' you need to stop doing whatever it is that you're doing until you figure out what you're screwing up. Seems incredibly basic, yet an absolutely astounding percentage of the population does not understand this principle somehow."