I would take advantage of it and get the skills and make $$. Muha!
Have you ever read some of the "manuals" for fixing stuff that exist in-house? In my experience they rarely spell out the stuff that a novice would need to know.
Both your redundant 155 Mbps links just managed to get null-routed? Oh, let's check what the manual says...
"Check if routing error originated locally or remotely? How do we do that? What's this BGP table thing it's talking about here? It says to 'call L3 NOC if remote', what does that mean? And what is the phone number? What are we supposed to tell them?"
i would be making a shit load of money...
Lol our NOC duties are completely different than yours, the guys over there pretty much just make tickets when anything goes wrong and they get notified, and they watch unix processes to make sure the financial processing finishes every day.
They don't actually troubleshoot anything. They get flustered if anything goes off their script and they don't know who to call, too.
Ive seen the IT Crowd. Not much would change.
"Have you tried turning it off and on again"
I'm 100% sure the world in general would dip into chaos in 1 month, there people that have been working on the same program for 10 years, thats 10 years of knowledge of the same code, which would be highly customized by that said person, now throw some new guy at that code, to work on it effectively this new guy would need to learn how the older guy coded hes shit, and being that the old guy disappeared, I think he'd be taking a few years to study the old guy's code...
Have to remember, IT people are not just those that support your PC when you get a virus or hardware fails. They are also the people fixing background issues most of you never even realize exist, because they are fixed before that.
Many large companies use custom software in their business. They employ software developers to maintain that software. To put someone in their place that didn't have an IT background, it would take at the very best 6 months + to get someone trained.
Web servers, data from banks....so much more. You can't just look what you need to know up in a book. Each company is different. Even if you know how to code in a language doesn't mean you can walk into a company and fix their software. Their software likely interfaces with other types of technology and you may for example have to understand what tables certain types of data are stored on a SQL server or something like that.
Point is, the world would be totally screwed.