I supported booking systems that could have bookings stretching far into the future, this made switching systems tricky as a lot of quite complex bookings would

I supported booking systems that could have bookings stretching far into the future, this made switching systems tricky as a lot of quite complex bookings would need recreating with each taking proper time to do. The scope for automation was there but that wasn't possible. With the software we supported there was no expertise in the company as the original developers left a long time ago. Therefore there was no way to understand why something broke or to write a patch. Instead everything was fixed by rote, if this went wrong then you did this. If that went wrong then you did whatever was needed for that. All of these fixes were handed down in the oral tradition and you took your own notes - there was no manual. We further out sourced to India so there was no trace of the people responsible for the code, just us clueless idiots. Some of these systems were MS DOS based and this was about a decade ago. What I did manage though was a means of getting on to any computer anywhere in the world even if it was totally air gapped and owned by someone that did not speak English. Even better, in most cases this would take seconds from a standing start. If I needed to access a computer that was on a remote network but turned off, I could usually Magic Packet it on and be fixing it as soon as it booted. This was a golden era for my remote access skills, nowadays I have difficulties getting my own computer online! There is another way of looking at this, from the perspective of what will be out there for you to do in 25 years time, I am optimistic that there will be legacy work for us if we cannot keep up with the new stuff.