Techie lured out of retirement to support software only he remembered
A retired software support specialist was lured back to work by a large US corporation to recover data from legacy systems that only he understood. The company needed the data to satisfy a tax audit after modernizing their business and making the original support team redundant.
Why it matters
It illustrates the risks corporations face when they aggressively modernize and cut staff without ensuring knowledge transfer or long-term data accessibility for legacy systems.
The first job was lucrative and went well, but a pension was preferable to rolling projects
Simon Sharwood Simon Sharwood APAC Editor APAC Editor Published fri 31 Jul 2026 // 07:30 UTC ON CALL Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day , dear reader! And happy Friday, too, as it heralds both the end of the working week and the day on which The Reg delivers another edition of On Call, the reader-contributed column in which we share your stories of support jobs that twisted, tanked, or turned out terrifically.
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Roger" who told us he spent decades providing application support for a UK-based software biz.
In 2015, Roger's company ended support for legacy products and assumed users would decommission their systems. The company advised them to preserve their old documents and invoices on paper or in durable file formats, just to be safe.
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