Support Newbie Figured Out How to Avoid All-Nighters, and His Colleagues Hated Him for It
The Register, Friday, July 24th, 2026
A new support hire automated overnight batch fixes, ending night calls and angering colleagues who relied on overtime.
In the 1990s, Lionel joined an IBM mainframe support team handling overnight COBOL batch jobs. Nightly emergency calls required him to fix malformed input data over slow remote connections, disrupting his sleep and family life.
Rather than endure it, he wrote an automated pre-process program to handle the data reformatting. The solution eliminated the overnight emergencies, but a colleague who depended on overtime pay strongly disapproved. Lionel kept looking for permanent fixes to other overnight issues despite the friction.