Given the response from a few here whenever being asked to do extra or cancel plans comes up is foot down, call the union and it’s not worth my free time etc. a great number of people just got on with it.
I’m a firm believer in “the door swings both ways,” and I’ve been afforded a -lot- of slack and freedom in the past to deal with personal issues. It’d have been churlish of me to say no, frankly. Plus, y’know, I get paid.
We patched an seriously large number of devices (end-user, servers but also Fiery printers etc) in a short space of time.
I’ve just had a conversation with a mate who was humblebragging about how he did 200 machines in 40 minutes. On our primary estates that’s precisely what happened, our internal servers & PCs and our cloud platform both have dedicated teams with robust patching policies and procedures in place.
However, I got to deal with all the off-domain cruft that was left over. We had to control individual reboots / failovers to redundant systems and so forth, with unique per-box login credentials, sometimes on systems that no-one we could find knew much about, on disconnected systems that weren’t necessarily accessible from a single management point. It just wasn’t practical (or safe) to to it in bulk.
And today, I actually got to make a start on my own kit. I manage what we call the Lab which is an area engineers can use to set up kit before it goes to site, build simulations for exams, and generally use it for their own nefarious purposes. I’ve got a VMware infrastructure with a homogeneous melting pot of OSes on there from Server 2003 to 2016, Windows 7 / 10, various flavours of Linux, virtual appliances and all sorts. Much of it predates my time there. So I’ve been playing “patch it or delete it” all day, if nothing else it’s done wonders for the disk space in the array.