Nothing like this story of getting bullied to do something, but I once talked a director out of rebooting the cell phone switch that handled all cellular phone calls for I think it was 4 provinces in Canada. This is something I don't think we had ever done before, and was expected to be a 100% outage for all cell phones calls + 911 for like 20 - 25 minutes or something.

We were having elevated error rates due to an earlier outage, and had just run the next closest hail mary to recovery the switch by telling it to resync all temporary state. The problem was that resync didn't work the way anyone on the team thought it did and the director didn't give enough time for it to be effective. We later found out the resync for a particular record didn't happen until the cell phone itself checked in with the network for a periodic update, so we had to wait for however long that timer was to expire on all cell phones. Luckily there was an active 911 call on the switch which caused the team to delay long enough for me to get the right data (the real world failure rate was far below 1% and starting to trend towards normal after the resync command) and talk the director out of the reboot.

The funny thing is that equipment wasn't even mine, I worked on the internet side of cell phones, and I don't even remember why I was pulled onto that outage call since it didn't have anything to do with my part of the network.