As a software engineer, I was summoned twice from high-up to directly deal with an end-user issue.

Once, it was an issue with the installation of a legacy product I didn't work on that failed on a specific platform. I was handed a RDP session and had 30 minutes to figure it out. Somehow I pulled through, found the bug in the installer and fixed it live. Apparently the customer was at the end of their wits because they were bouncing back and forth with support for the past three months or so.

Another time, it was random crashes in a legacy product I didn't work on (again) that happened only with a specific combination of hardware and operating system. In three days, I've root caused it to the product's platform abstraction layer where the pthread mutexes were not created with the recursive flag. The bug was introduced over 10 years ago and the undefined behavior only triggered with a recent version of glibc running combined with a recent generation of Intel processors.

In both cases, I can't help but sympathize with the customer, who hit a real critical bug and had to escalate it all the way up until it reached me, the person you call when there is no one else left to call.