Do NOT underestimate the simple things you do, seriously.

I'm an infrastructure freelancer, I do lots of IaaS and on prem deployments, this client had an environment on Azure that I built 3 years ago with front end service that runs on top of MSMQ and a back end SQL setup, they have a dev team to develop and maintain the app on the servers, it's been going strong with all the underlying changes that happened on Azure. I do support on call every 4 - 5 months to do simple configuration changes on the server.

The client called a week ago asking for help, the MSMQ services are no longer running, all his dev team quit and there are no documentation, no hand over material, nothing to help understand how the services are configured, no troubleshooting guide, it was a total mess.

I politely apologize and say he better find a dev guy to try and help him with the services, as I can help maintain the infrastructure but not the code or the app, he goes his way and calls a couple of days letter asking for help, I repeat the same response and he disappears for a few more days.

Today, he called, and actually was a hair away from begging for help, he explained that he got a couple of guys to look into the matter but they couldn't help. In my mind I was ready to kick him and ask to never call about the problem again, but I felt that he was really disparate for help, I reluctantly tell him that I'd give it a look and remote into the environment to see what is happening.

I find the first error in the event log that is related to MSMQ, Google it, come up with a solution and apply it, services are magically up and running again, it was something related to truncating the MSMQ log files and resetting a registry key.

I call the client to inform him of the news, and to my surprise, the guy start sobbing uncontrollably over the phone, telling me how he lost everything he has over the past few months, all his employees and partners left him and are refusing to give any help, he have no mean of income except of the app running on the IaaS servers, his customers who were using the app are threatening to ghost him along with the over 8 months due payments, he said that his wife is waiting for those payments to get a treatment from something I couldn't bring my self to ask about.

Man, I keep having goosebumps just remembering him crying over the phone. To me what I did was extremely simple and even no-brainer, to him it was treatment for his wife, a mean to live and support his family and god knows what else.

Do the simple things people, you never know what the other person is going through. :(

Edit: the sheer kindness and empathy this community has is why I feel proud and humbled to call my self a sysadmin, thank you all for your words, you all truly made my day :)